Rob Grootendorst was a Dutch communication and argumentation theory scholar. He was professor for Dutch speech communication at the University of Amsterdam. His contributions to the argumentation field include the co-foundation of the pragma-dialectic school in argumentation theory. Detailed description: Grootendorst was a teacher at an elementary school in the 1960s. He studied Dutch studies at the University of Amsterdam since 1980, and became a Ph.D. in 1982 in Speech Communication. The dissertation was jointly written with Frans H. van Eemeren. They jointly founded the International Society for the Study of Argumentation in 1986. Grootendorst together with Frans H. van Eemeren, developed pragma-dialectics, or pragma-dialectical theory, at the University of Amsterdam. It is an argumentation theory that is used to analyze and evaluate argumentation in actual practice. Unlike strictly logical approaches (which focus on the study of argument as product), or purely communication approaches (which emphasize argument as a process), pragma-dialectics was developed to study the entirety of an argumentation as a discourse activity. Thus, the pragma-dialectical theory views argumentation as a complex speech act that occurs as part of natural language activities and has specific communicative goals. He also wrote several books on the life and works of the Dutch writer and politician Theo Thijssen.