Gender

Gender

Deborah Tanned expresses why men and women communicate poorly. She expresses the reason of why the miscommunication occurs by identifying the conversational areas in which men and women have the most miscommunication: apologies, criticism, thank-yous, fighting, praise, complaints, and jokes. She provides different scenarios in each category. She wants everyone to realize that there is no right way to talk but style differences can be blamed for when a problem of communication arises. “If you want to get your message across, it’s not a question of being right, it’s a question of using language that’s shared of at least understood.” When trying to get your point across, people need to change their language style so it suits the person they are talking to because it can lead to miscommunication if they do not.
Deborah Tannen also discusses men and women’s faults and how these same methods that are usually employed to make conversation easier often end up leading to more misunderstandings. In this piece, Tannen attempts to neutrally present these ideas without letting her own sex or experiences make this piece sound biased. Tannen's method of presenting ways of conversing employed by the sexes seems to have the goal of being objective, and it shows. She constantly sticks in phrases such as "all styles will fail at times" to try and demonstrate her neutral stance on the subject. It is clear that her intention is to classify different behaviors without inserting her own personal feelings into the mix. Though she is correct in saying that "there is no 'right' way to talk," Tannen is not entirely successful in demonstrating this judgment in her piece. Her writing seems to reflect an effort to try and present the men's conversational strengths equally with the women's, and to present as many faults of the women's system as she does of the men's. Despite this, her writing shows, especially in the "Jokes" section, that she does lean toward defending women more than men as...

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