Deborah Tannen You Just Don T Understand Summary

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Critique of Deborah Tannen's " You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation." In '' You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation," Deborah Tannen argues and states that men and women have different communication skills. Over the past ten years, plentiful investigations and analysis were focused on the different skills of communication between males and females among different cultures. . For instance, we have seen how communication failures in the multicultural systems have donated in degrading the personal relationships in the workplace. However, some organizations stared to look over the failure of communication between females and males in some public events. Tannen focused on the cultural gap and…show more content…
Therefore, Tannen wrote that men and women have different motivations. For example, men are motivated by status, while women by relationships. Actually the difference in motivations supports the author's point of view of men and women communication skills. She confers the approach of asymmetry, in which men try to reach and have the upper hand in the talks. Men always seek to have the power and control in conversations. On the other hands, females concentrate on symmetry for instance, using statements such as I know how you feel or I have felt this before. Men tend to organize their talks competitively, while women tend to organize their talks cooperatively. Sometimes males see females talk as trivial and females see male's straightforwardness as impolite. These different communication skills results in a communication failure in the workplace and public events, which may result to less production and relationships. For example, this may be very obvious in the meeting room. In which men tend to steer meetings and as a result a confident women may turn passive from the vocal clash. There is a
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    Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor with a research specialty in conversational styles at Georgetown University, illustrated the Genderlect Styles theory, the idea that discourse differences between male and female are two distinct cultural dialects. The origins of this theory comes from Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand, which looks at explaining why men and women talk past one another and strongly believes that male and female conversation is cross-cultural communication. Genderlect

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