You Just Don 't Understand By Deborah Tannen Essay

Deborah Tannen and William Lutz both discuss the difficulty of communicating. Their point of views may be different, but their conclusion is the same. Men and women have difficulties of communicating. Not because the two genders want to be complicated but simply because we don’t realize how or what we’re doing when it’s happening.

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.

Adults sometimes forget that children communicate on a much more literal level than they do; their conversation is often

Explain how people from different backgrounds may use and/ or interpret communication methods in different ways

Tannen effectively opens with an anecdote about how she was at a gathering for a women’s group and men were invited. She talks about how one guy was very talkative, offering ideas and telling stories, while his wife was sitting in silence. Towards the end of the evening Tannen commented that “women frequently complain that their husbands don’t talk to them”. The man quickly agreed with Tannen and admitted that his wife was the talker in their family and if it weren’t for

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

Explain how people from different backgrounds may use and/or interpret communication methods in different ways

People from different backgrounds may use and/or interpret communication methods in different ways because every family has their own way of communicating together. For example: some children might hear or speak more than one language at home or they could hear others swearing. This can affect children’s communication and how they communicate as adults.

To begin, Tannen’s article shows a primarily positive tone. She maintains a casual tone as she compares the dissimilarities between men and women’s communicative interactions. To further exemplify, Tannen first gives an example of either a male or a female encounter and then contrasts it with comparative words such as “but” or “while.” She uses language to divide but not exalt one language preference in greater esteem than the other. In her passage regarding apologizing,

Everyone is an individual but people from the same or similar backgrounds tend to communicate in the same ways. This is to do with shared culture, different experiences and family backgrounds. Therefore when communicating with people who have a similar background to you, you may assume that they will interpret what you are saying in the way you intended however you should not expect this to happen or use this as a method of course. The experiences of communication children have depend a lot on their home lives as experiences outside of the home environment and family circles at this age will be limited.

Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable. Different texts suggest not how to avoid conflict, but rather how to effectively communicate when involved in one. However, the “rules” of constructive communication can completely change in conflicts between people in long-term, interdependent relationships. This paper will focus on analyzing a conversation between a mother and her adult son, while applying ideas from William Wilmot and Joyce Hocker’s Interpersonal Conflict, Deborah Tannen’s I Only Say This Because I Love You, and the “Conflict Styles” lecture.

Dumlao, Rebecca. Botta, Renee.”Family communication patterns and the conflict styles young adults use with their fathers.” Communication Quarterly. Vol. 48 no. 2 Spring 2000: 174-189.

Anthropologists and sociologists agree that people commonly learn communication skills in younger years specifically in “sex-separate peer groups” (Tannen 345). Young girls are typically more reserved and generally confide their feelings and ideas in smaller groups with close friends. On the contrary, boys enjoy competing for attention in larger groups. The article mentions, “boys are expected to use language to seize center stage: by exhibiting their skill, displaying their knowledge, and challenging and resisting challenges” (Tannen

Although Jim did learn speech it became noticeably odd to others around him as he had developed his own, unique grammatical characteristics and his poor articulation meant he didn’t acquire normal language skills (Sachs et al 1981). Bruner suggests that this was due to lack of social interaction in his learning of speech, which again highlights the importance of nurture in promoting a child’s language development.

Children rely heavily on the input of their surrounding environments to develop these skills further (Eileen Allen & Marotz, 2003). The communication strategy used by children over the first year of life is predominately non-verbal before development progresses to include verbal communication (Rodnick & Wood, 1973). McDevitt and Ormrod (2010) suggest social emotional, physical and cognitive development is facilitated by the experiences children have in their “family, school and community” (p. 5). This raises the idea that the level of communicative development may differ greatly between children depending on experiential exposure. Rodnick and Wood (1973) expand on this further suggesting children will actually develop a level of grammatical and language understanding which is essential to communication, long before they commence schooling. In research conducted by Rodnick and Wood (1973) it was noted in their findings that the children subject to their research demonstrated a lower level of communication than expected at around the age of seven and suggest it may be due to environmental factors. This then draws some attention to the educator and their ability to teach a developing child not only the importance of communication, but also the skills of appropriate and effective communication.