You Just Don'Y Understand

While boys focus more on status in conversation, girls tend to concentrate on emotional connection and sympathetic sameness. Early on, boys tend to realize that there is always going to be a dominant position and a subordinate position in communication. Because of this, boys will aim to be the dominating person, or at least not the subordinate. This can be seen in competitive games where little boys try to outdo each other by saying that they have or that they are the best. When these same boys grow up, this importance of status becomes embedded into their heads so that

Men and women communicate in very different ways. Men want to see the solution, they want to just get straight to the point and then be done with the situation. Women on the other hand tend to be more detail-oriented before they get to

The typical stereotypes of communication are that women talk more than men, that is not necessarily true. For example, Tannen states, “...another explanation is that men think women talk to much because they hear women talking in situations where men would not: on the telephone; or in social situations with friends, when they are not discussing topics that men find inherently interesting, or; like the couple at the women’s group, at home alone-in other words, in private speaking” (Cooper and MacDonald 11). Men and women have two different conversational styles, different ways of talking. They also have different ideas of what is important and what is not. For example, Tannen points out that the man thought it wasn’t important that his friend was getting married, but the woman had thought that it was important (Cooper and MacDonald 12).

We see a silence in several women today by looking at their swollen eyes and their cold and startled behavior that they are traumatized by their own husbands. Solnit expresses, "Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard,

Bonds between boys are based less on talking and more on doing things together. Boy's groups are larger and more hierarchical and they struggle with group status. The article suggests that women's complaints that men don't listen to them may stem from the fact that being a listener produces the feeling of being talked down to, a

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 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.

“Women’s Right” claims that society’s view of women is an indicator of intellectual, economic, and cultural progress; however, women have been denied many fundamental rights (n.pag.). Write declares that the lack of confidence and forcefulness in women are some factors that are holding the progress of equality back (n.pag.). In today’s society, women are taught to think that a man’s job is more important than a women’s (Write n.pag.). Women were raised to believe that the men’s paycheck is the primary support for a family. Society teaches women to be passive and nurturing while it teaches men to be aggressive and dominant (Nadler and Stockdale 281+). Boys are trained to focus solely on themselves while women are supposed to place the needs of others first (Johnson n.pag.). Society is the reason that women lack the aggression and motivation needed to advance in their career

Due to the different ways of expressing politeness and conversational involvement, they may have trouble communicating even if they share the same language. The ‘two cultures' approach proposes that talk between women and men is fraught with potential misunderstanding for much the same reasons that communication across the ethnic groups is (Mary Crawford, Talking Difference On Gender and Language, 1995). Hence, I agree with the point of view of Deborah Tannen. However, "You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation" does not inform readers about the reasons and the consequences of the communication differences between genders. Therefore, this essay will include the above

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

In order to be able to solve some of the problems associated with gender miscommunications, we should distinguish first between the two different types of communications: verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication consists of messages expressed by linguistic means such as the use of intonation, the specific words we choose to say, and the way we are saying them. There are differences in females and males usage of language/verbal communication. As we might expect from traditional sex-role stereotypes, girls tend to establish more egalitarian same-sex groups. Girls use friendly groups as a training ground for cooperation. Boys view friendly conversation among their friends as training for verbal aggression. Females are more verbal, use three times more amount of words than males, they are much more descriptive and use more adjectives. Women are less direct in their communication style. As Prof. Tannen showed in one of her research, women are more indirect in answering questions depends on the situation. They answer questions the way they would like to be answered by men, which means more than just a yes/no answer. However, men answer the way they would like to be answered

Barkalow (1991) tells us her story that she was in the first class of West Point, which is Military academy, located north of New York city, and during the first year, she often heard back “Mornin’ bitch” after greeting “Good morning sir” to her upperclassmen (Gardner p.219). Those men did not respect Carol Bark because they must have thought that she was weak and impossible to handle harass environment in being trained because of her female sex. Generally, many societies and cultures have created different roles between male and female sexes. In their research, McCubbin and Dahl (1985) state clearly, “men should be brave, strong, ambitious, and aggressive, while keeping their feelings under

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.

Deborah Tannen is the author of the book You Just Don't Understand where she analyzes the different meanings of communication between men and women. Her research shows that women and men use the same words and phrases and yet can interpret and react to those same words and phrases differently. Tannen compares the two sexes to find men use their conversation as a type of competition or to preserve their independence. For example, men talk about their knowledge regarding sports, cars, women, exc. Meanwhile, women try to foster intimacy through communication. For instance, women often talk and relate on a personal level. Throughout Tannen's book she uses "cross-cultural communication" to describe the differences between the language of

According to Deborah Tannen, a linguistic professor of Georgetown University, men and women talk differently and sometimes it might be very complex as she stated that many coupes 'grew in diverse cultures.' Men consider communication as a primary language of 'report.' They feel more