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Chapter Summary Of Conversations And Interrupting

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Gossip is the point of discussion for chapter four. She talks about how things like secrets and gossip are very important in building friendships, especially in those of women. Sharing of personal things like that just strengthen the bond between two people. To be honest this chapter was more about explaining females behavior to men. Of all the chapters this one was the most one sided in that regard. Chapter five talks about listening, and to a smaller extent the act of giving information. In regards to giving information she found a phenomenon where when men explain things to women they tend to over explain. According to her the reason is only in each others habitual styles. Where men are naturally more of the lecturers of conversations, and …show more content…

She ponders over the fabled question of, “who interrupts who more, men or women.” The answer she deduced was that we both equally interrupt each other. Citing that for many men conversation is seen as a contest, where steering the conversation back to something they can seem knowledgable on is a top priority. For women she found that the actual action of talking over one another was more prevalent, a tendency she called “overlapping talking.” To sum it up, men will interrupt you to change the subject, women will start talking before you finish talking. Like most of our traits they are just the effect of our habitual styles of talking from when we were children. Chapter eight has two main points. The first being that men boast in public in an attempt to move up in their hierarchical order. Women do not brag in public because that goes against the women code of stressing similarities and connection not differences. The second being that men and women talk about different things when with a group of their same-sex friends. I found this one to be the most obvious discovery in the book. The general jist of men's conversations was about things like their jobs, sports, food. Women's conversations revolved around subjects like people and health. Chapter nine was pretty unique in structure compared to the rest of the chapters. It was dedicated to one bit of research, a collection of videotaped interviews between pairs of boys and pairs of girls starting at the second grade and ending with college aged men and women. The interviews were simple in nature, just one boy talking to the other, the same went for the girls as well. What they were able to find from this study though was that boys and girls really do live in two different worlds. Even from as early as the second grade their mannerisms are night and day when compared to one another. The little girl's follow orders and sit facing each other, talking about relevant

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