The Challenge of Communication between Men and Women Essay

When we happen upon an event that threatens to change our views of how a man or a woman should behave, something miraculous happens. We change almost instantly into a being that is primal, thoughts come bubbling up from inside us as we involuntarily begin to correct anyone naïve enough to think that things can be different. We lash out at the person responsible for the proposed shift in our perception, whether it is through verbal communication or body language, we communicate that they have crossed the proverbial line in the sand.

To define these communication conundrums, Tannen discusses “rapport-talk” and “report-talk”. She defines “rapport-talk” as “For most women, the language of conversation is primarily

The authors motivation for writing “Talk in the Intimate Relationship,” is “to see how male and female differences in conversational style can cause misunderstandings that lead to complementary schismogenesis- a mutually aggravating spiral, in close relationships.” (Tannen 28) Also, Tannen’s motivation for writing this article is to show us how men and women go about having different ways of talking things out, and the assumptions that they have and how they go about it. What the author wants us to think after we have read the text is, she wants us to realize how women are much more focused on involvement, and they listen for metamessages, whereas, men are more focused on independence.

Male and female differ in their use of communication because their reasons for communicating are different. Men

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

Women tend to be more emotional and rational then men, whereas men are far less emotional and react on impulse. The different understanding of the ways that each sex communicates is still to be studied. Women tend to react more emotionally than men, resulting in submerging themselves, mind body and soul into making decisions. Meanwhile men, impulsively react to situations for the sake of having a reason to do so. Men see women as less competent to making decisions that involve a lot of thought, and this is due to women’s

The media has largely influenced how we view male and female. In this paper, I will talk about three medium and give my thoughts and opinion regarding gender in communication on each of them. The three medium I chose was a pick-up truck TV commercial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ab2VT-g6s, the character Mulan from the Disney movie Mulan and the song “I’ll Make a Man out of You” also from the movie Mulan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64. I never realized until now how much of an impact the media has made on my views on male and female regarding gender communication. Media does not only give out entertainment, but it also in a way manipulates one’s way of developing their opinions, reaction, feelings and beliefs.

In response to what we have discussed thus far in Interpersonal Communication, I would like to further explore the idea of gender in the interpersonal communication arena. As was said in class, ”gender influences cultural perspectives.” Gender also influences how we view ourselves in society. On the flip side, I’ve seen how society can mold the way we label ourselves in terms of gender.

There exists a disparity in the communication phenomenon between men and women. This disparity according to scholars can be attributed to the male dominance in the society today and relationship tensions between couples. A study on cross-sex conversations showed that, when men and women engage in a friendly conversation, they do so as equals but they do not play the same roles in the communication. Women tend to ask more questions and likely to utter utterances that encourage responses from the other speaker. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to interrupt their partner’s conversations and make direct opinions and facts to control or dominate the conversation. Thus, the communication phenomenon between men and women is strikingly distinct.

Men and woman see, and access the world in different ways. The views of author of John Gray (1992) can be gleaned simply from reading the title of his book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Though arguably exaggerated, Gray’s words seem to embody a popular belief, that men and woman are inherently different; almost – seemingly – from different worlds. It is the

During spring and summer of 201 I underwent a six month internship in the information services department of a major company in my country Botswana. The company , Botswana power corporation is the sole producer and distributor of electricity in Botswana. As a company with branches all over the country it is easy to understand why communication would be crucial to the day to day operations of this company as a whole. For the sake of clarity however I’m going to limit the focus of this paper to the Information servives departmentin which I worked.

Men, on the other hand, are more likely than women to associate touching with sexual intentions and therefore are much less likely to use touch during a conversation with another male. (Carnes) At the core, the reasons why men and women have different body language tendencies lies in accordance with each respective gender’s interpretations of signals he or she gives or receives. It is clear that they ways that men and women use nonverbal communication significantly differ from one another.

Miscommunication has been a problem when dealing with these differences such as relationships. Romantic relationships often end due to miscommunication between the man and woman (Renwall.2010). It’s not because either of the two didn’t have good intentions, it’s because they didn’t communicate well enough to

The assertion that men and women communicate in different ways, about different things, and for different reasons seems to go un-argued and is accepted as true by a vast majority of Americans. It is the reason why we

In the article “Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers” by Deborah Tannen, you will begin to see and discover the differences in conversation between men and women. Discussed throughout this paper are the importance of metamessages, an overview of Tannen’s article, whether Tannen is fair in her article toward both men and women and whether I agree with Tannen’s article as well as experiences of my peer’s and myself.