Deborah Tannen Analysis

Communication is the means of connection between people or places, it’s an easy every day use. Most of us get into the habit of talking a specific way towards females and males, although it does differ depending on who you are you’d be surprised on how often it actually happens. This habit starts very early on, way back to grade school the way we interact with people then and the social interaction we have now correlate with habits that start early on in life. Another thing is the way you’re brought up and your culture some may be raised differently or some may have more interaction with females than males and vice versa. One author that shows interest in this topic is Deborah Tannen, she is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. She wrote an excerpt called, “Why Can’t He Hear What I’m Saying?” in this she discusses her relationship with her husband and how their relationship lacked communication which lead to a divorce. In this excerpt she hits a lot of essential points in gender communication. Overall, depending on how and where you grow up greatly effects the way you communicate with the opposite sex whether it’s realized or not.

Male’s tend to be straight-forward and get to the point quite fast where as woman use different silent tactics and “clues” to communicate. Another thing is woman tend to want to talk and share their feelings either with another female or a significant other. Men however, don’t see any point in discussing feelings and tend to keep to themselves most of the time. When woman get mad the tend to be mad for quite some time as well as having that argument affect their whole relationship where as men have an argument and end up getting over it fairly fast and move on. All these different thing contributing to how men and woman are so different in the way we communicate, its amazing we even get along at