Joseph W. Wenzel (November 30, 1933 - December 30 2021) was an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar.
His students include Dale Hample, Daniel J. O'Keefe, and Charles Arthur Willard.
His seminal contribution to argument theory appears in 1979: ‘Jurgen Habermas and the Dialectical Perspective on Argumentation’, Journal of the American Forensic Association 16, 83–94.
He has published 30 articles and book chapters on topics in rhetoric and argumentation.
He was Editor of the Journal of the American Forensic Association, 1983–86, and has served on the editorial boards of Argumentation, Central States Speech Journal, Communication Monographs, Informal Logic and Quarterly Journal of Speech.