You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Essay Example
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Essay Example

You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (653 words)
  • Published: April 6, 2017
  • Type: Essay
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In reading Deborah Tannen’s essay “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,” I was found to believe that the main idea of this essay was the language of everyday conversation. The subject of Deborah Tannen’s essay would be in my opinion the difference in which males and females use communication skills. When it comes to men, they seem to talk more if they were sitting next to a female. Also a boys way of communicating with other boys, was not by talking, but by more of engaging in activities with them. As with females, they actually engaged in communicating.

They mostly sit and talk, and tell secrets to one another. Tannen stated that she observed that, "For males, conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and keep people from p

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ushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy; talk is the essence of intimacy, so being best friends means sitting and talking. For boys, activities, doing things together, are central. Just sitting and talking is not an essential part of friendship. They're friends with the boys they do things with. I completely agree with her statement.

Males, in my opinion, speak more sternly to try and prove themselves to other males. While females speak more calm and subtle to try to create a bond with other females. Just as when it comes to boys and girls having to speak in front of large groups, girls tend to do it more easily, while boys are more comfortable at doing it. Walter Ong states that it’s more known fo

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males to use speaking in a setting which is more in a challenge and argument situation. Also he gives an example by which a boy shows his like for a girl by pulling her hair and shoving her.

While boys find that a fun way of doing things, girls usually do not. It’s also spoken about how women of other countries use the communication aspect as some sort of ritual lament. They use it more when there’s a loss of a loved one and etc. She also spoke about the teaching styles in American conversation. Tannen referred to how women bond by talking about troubles, while men bond by playing insults and put-downs. There were many different views about this topic. While it was mostly viewed that women talked more, some people saw that in certain situations, women did not speak at all.

When it came to being in the classroom setting, men were more comfortable and willing to openly speak and take the floor than women were. Women feel as though they will dominate if they do speak up more than once or twice in class. Deborah Tannen also went deeper and stated that, "Women want men to do what we want. We want them to want to do what we want, because that's what we do. If a woman perceives that something she's doing is really hurting a man, she wants to stop doing it. If she perceives that he really wants her to do something, she wants to do it.

She thinks that that's love and he should feel the same way about her. But men have a gut-level resistance to doing what they're told,

to doing what someone expects them to do. It's the opposite response of what women have. " I’ve also seen that scenario played out numerous times. Women love when what we want men to do, actually gets done. While men more frequently do more of what they want to do rather than what we want them to do. Tannen also felt as though that finding a more diverse way for a classroom to interact is the best way for anything to work. I completely agree with her.

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