Gender Deborah Tannen

In the first excerpt Deborah Tannen wrote “But What Do You Mean?”, she breaks down and classifies the conversational areas where men and women have the most difficulties communication. Tannen’s excerpt is written from a personal point of view, it is written within her daily workplace and based off actions or events she encounters between men and women. Tannen argues that men tend to be more confrontational when communication and women happen to approach confrontation in a subtle way. Men are direct and to the point, while women try to negotiate. In the excerpt Tannen breaks her argument into 7 sperate

In the video lecture presented by Deborah Tannen, He Said, She Said, Tannen emphasizes that men and women grow up in very different social worlds. When boys grow up, they learn that there is often going to be an inequality of force in any conversation. For girls, however, they feel that equality is very important and that it needs to be enforced through sympathy-based bonding. As adults, these different messages behind socialization can often lead to confusion, miscommunication, and, sometimes, hurt feelings. Tannen explores the difficulties of cross-gender communication and how we can overcome them by understanding where these conversational rituals come from. As a reflection on Tannen’s lecture, this paper will analyze how the different developments of boys and girls lead to the different views men and women have on the world. First of all, childhood and friendship is perceived differently by each gender.

Deborah Tannen’s case study entitled “Can’t We Talk?” is the most relevant reading that I have ever done for any class. It relates to a problem that every person regardless of age, race or sex, will have to face many times in his or her lifetime. The problem is that men and women communicate differently and these differences can often lead to conflict. This case study is very informative because it helps to clarify the thought process of each sex. That said this reading leaves the reader somewhat unfulfilled because Tannen does not offer a solution to the problem.

Deborah Tannen, who is a professor of linguistics, says in her essay, "How Male And Female Students Use Language Differently", that after she made her book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” that one of the unintended benefits was that she gets to reevaluate her teaching strategies and see how male and females act differently in class. As you read through her essay you can tell that Deborah Tannen wants her readers to think about why males tend to speak more in discussions than females and the reason for this difference in the classroom and also how we can improve the classroom for both men and women.Although Tannen tends to get off topic and doesn 't have much evidence to back up some of her claims, she states

She found that at every age, girls and women faced each other directly. On the other side of things, she noticed that at every age, boys and men sat at angles to each other and looked elsewhere in the room. Tannen demonstrates this when she gives the example of a woman in college who was frustrated because every time she would try and talk to her boyfriend he would lay down and put his arm over his face. This signaled that he was taking a nap, but he insisted that it was the only way he could listen without being distracted. Tannen follows by saying, “I believe these systematic differences in childhood socialization make talk between men and women like cross-cultural communication, heir to all the attraction and pitfalls of that enticing but difficult enterprise”. She backs her claim by discussing a research she discovered in an issue of American Psychologist. The research revealed that children’s development is most influenced by the social structure of peer interactions. The research later showed boys and girls tend to play with children of their own gender, and their sex-separate groups have different organizational structures and interactive

Deborah Tannen’s essay “But What Do You Mean?” focuses on what she claims are differences between men and women when it comes to social interaction. The essay is sectioned into seven categories, in which she talks about how men and women tend to think and react when it comes to apologizing, criticizing, thanking, fighting, praising, complaining, and joking with others. In general, she seems to promote the idea that women tend to be more polite and refined, considering the feelings of others when conversing and taking everything as a formality. In contrast, men are apparently more blunt, taking a more direct approach with matters and being more unconcerned with how they may affect others. Women tend to automatically apologize and thank others

In her essay, "But What Do You Mean?" Deborah Tannen discusses how men and women 's conversation styles differ in how they communicate with one another. The problem is that men and women have different perspectives. Tannen explains that the "conversation rituals" among women are designed to be polite and sensitive to others, while the "conversation rituals" among men are designed to maintain superiority (328). Tannen explores seven ways in which men and women miscommunicate : apologies, criticism, thank-yous, fighting, praise, complaints, and jokes. Being no fault of either party, conversation strategies between men and women are just naturally different, these miscommunications can make conversation awkward and sometimes can be misunderstood.

In the essay, “But What Do You Mean?” author and linguistic expert Deborah Tannen argues her feelings on how men and women vary in their use of conversational “rituals.” She states that males have a tendency to use wording to sustain dominance in conversation; however, women seem to take in to account the feelings of others. Tannen identifies seven categories in which men and women differ in communication. First, women use apologies to assure other people. Men can misapprehend these apologies as taking blame rather than as the ritual reassurance that women mean for it to be perceived. This supports what Tannen says in her essay, “But there are times when ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t self-deprecating or even an apology” (Tannen 380). Second, men are more straight-forward when criticizing more than women; women “soften” their criticism with the purpose of sparing the feelings of the person they are criticizing. Third, women often say “thank you” ritualistically, most of the time to equate the two in the conversation. Fourth, men enjoy “verbally sparring” more than women. Because of this difference, women are under the impression that they are usually condemned in a conversation. Fifth, women and men use praise differently. Women tend to expect praise open-heartedly when they are praised. Men, on the other hand, often confuse that not criticizing is praise enough. Sixth, women converse their complications in order to share their experiences; they complain not to solve their

In the essay Sex, Lies, and Conversation Deborah Tannen focuses on the differences and lack of communication between men and women though observations. She came to the conclusion that men were not lacking in their listening, but they were however listening in a different way than the women did. On the other hand, men aren’t the only people that have terrible communication skills. In many ways, these differences between the two genders can cause major conflict when not understood by the opposite side. A few examples of lack of communication may be when women don’t decide where they would like to eat, men who walk away from an argument rather than talking it out, and their decision making processes.

Conversation is a ritual every person must encounter throughout their lives in order to function properly with one another in today’s society. However, every individual has a “different idea about what’s appropriate” when approaching someone in any sort of conversation; that is why we are referred to as individuals (Tannen 327). There are thousands of diverse languages to speak to one another with, in fact that means there are thousands of different ways to offend each other with our words. Within those languages there are several contrasting gestures that can offend any single person, such as the amount of times individuals apologize in one meeting, giving criticism too harshly, or thanking someone so often it does not seem genuine. In the article “What Do You Mean,” Deborah Tannen touches upon apologies, criticism, and thank yous in further detail to explain where individuals go wrong within conversation and how they can fix their actions. Individuals find it satisfying to please others by being polite because it is the ‘right’ thing to do, however like myself others need to stand up for themselves and get directly to the point now in order to avoid conflict later in life.

Each individual conveys their ideas in unique ways. Men and women in particular express themselves in drastically different ways. In “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently,” Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, experiments with the causes of classroom dynamics. Tannen opens her discussion by exploring the beginning stages of learning communication skills and then fast forwards to adulthood. Tannen uses research from sociologists and anthropologists such as Lever, Goodwin, and Eder as well as insight from Walter Ong to add credibility and to create a foundation for her explanation of the causes of classroom dynamics. Tannen expands on this research from cultural and behavioral professionals by creating an experiment in her own classroom to demonstrate that communication skills learned and cemented in younger years, combined with a “ritual opposition” setting, produce classroom dynamics.

Through her use of the rhetorical devices of personal experience, ethos, and comparison, venerated Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen persuaded me to concede with her argument that males and females communicate differently in the classroom, as indicated in her 1991 article How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently. In this composition, she emphasizes that because of intersexual differences in utilizing the spoken word in class differently, instructors, including herself, consider reevaluating their teaching strategies. In her case, revising the approach involved building experience through closely monitoring her classes and collaborating with colleagues.

This causes women to become more vocal. Tannen suggests that status affects many different ways in which men communicate and raises several different examples. One area she found was that men tell more stories and jokes than women. She suggests that they are not doing this to be funny but instead do it to again to negotiate status. They often tell stories in which they are the heroes and act alone to overcome obstacles. While women use storytelling to gain support from her personal networks. They use their stories that, if they are the subject of, contain her doing something foolish to put her at the same level as the listener. In this way women are not concerned with status as with relating and gaining support. Men and women also differ when they are listening. While women tend to use eye contact and head nods to let the speaker know that she is listening. Men often do not use these techniques because they suggest agreement with the speaker. Women also a technique which Tannen calls cooperative overlap. This happens sometimes when women start to speak before the other person finishers speaking. They usually do this to agree and show support for what the speaker is saying. Women see cooperative overlap as a way to continue the conversation while men see it as a competitive ploy to gain control of that conversation. In this way communication again is not made clear, men are annoyed because they believe that

Gender Matters is a collection of various essays on feminist linguistic texts analysis, by Sara Mills. Mills develops methods of analyzing literary and non-literary texts, in addition to conversational analysis based on a feminist approach. The author draws on data from her collection of essays gathered over the last two decades on feminism during the 1990s. The essays focus on gender issues, the representation of gender in reading, writing, and in public speaking. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of feminists’ analysis of sexism in literature and the relation between gender and politeness. The article is informative for my research paper, as my

She studied ethnic groups, which speak the same language using different styles, and found that the effect of gender on communication is miniscule compared to the effect of culture and socialization. In her research, Tannen asserts that the basic uses of conversation by women are to establish and support intimacy; while for men it is to acquire status. These styles and motives for communicating represent different cultural upbringings, and one is not necessarily better than the other. However, she also notes in her findings that men tend to interrupt more and ask questions less. In fact, the female tendency to ask more questions sometimes results in receiving lower grades from male professors who view frequent questioning as proof that a student knows less than her male counter parts.