Analysis Of Why Do You Have To Say That By Deborah Tannen

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Deborah Tannen is a linguist who researched the mother-daughter relationship. Tannen researched this topic by interviewing individuals and reading about the subject. She gathered all of her research, and wrote a piece named “Oh, Mom. Oh, Honey: Why Do You Have to Say That?” The purpose of her article was to introduce her findings to a general audience, so people could understand how they apply to their everyday lives.

Tannen used a lot of dialog from the interviews she conducted in the essay. Primary sources are important when it comes to essays with lots of information, and Tannen used that to her advantage. Readers, particularly female readers, will be able to relate to many of these conversations. The dialogs she uses support her views
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Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.” In the 2,500 words, Tannen talks about a numerous things. Early in the paper she states that her mother passed away while working on this paper. A quarter into the essay, she uses [[ethos? ethos means “culture” / “philosophy”, is this what you mean?]] and lets the reader know that she is a linguist.

Tannen organized her article well. She first explained her experience of researching the topic during the death of her mother. Then, she detailed all the information that she had gathered. Her writing style moves back and forth between narrative and dialog. That makes the topic a little more interesting. She was very effective at using the dialogs as examples to strengthen her viewpoint on mother-daughter relationships. For everything theory she proposed, Tannen impressively used a conversation to support and clarify it.

As stated earlier in this analysis, Tannen’s purpose was to inform, yet her method of organizing her paper was not done as well as it could have been. The usage of dialog makes her paper interesting, but it does not always help the reader learn more about the topic. While the dialog does help support her theories, some of it could have been left

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