ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies argumentative tactics that have emerged in the midst of a media environment where substantive news items must be fit in between advertisement breaks, and where a premium is thereby placed on getting the last word in an exchange. The spitballer seeks to derail argument by overloading her interlocutors with multiple provocative slogans. At its core, spitballing works as follows: One makes multiple contributions to a discussion, often as fast as one can think them up. The swamper, by contrast, seeks to dominate argument by setting himself, and his enigmatic pronouncements, up to be the sole topic of conversation. Steamrolling is the strategy of simply running out the clock on the argument by disallowing discussion. One derails an exchange when one speaks for the sake of creating a conversational rupture that substitutes the topic previously under consideration with some ambiguous, contentious, and unwieldy alternative.
