But What Do You Mean By Deborah Tannen Analysis

“Alec Mitchell!” Screamed my mother, “You need to be nicer to your younger brother!” “It was just a joke, Mom.” I responded, but she did not buy it. I was not even being mean at the time to my 15 year old brother, but she thought differently because we had contrasting ideas about what is proper in a conversation. I believed the joke to be appropriate because it was “guy talk”, however, she saw it as rude. In Deborah Tannen’s “But What Do You Mean?” communication failures and differences between men and women are discussed. Tannen hypothesizes that women and men have different ideas about what’s appropriate when speaking, which can sometimes create a misunderstanding. Men and women have contrasting conversation rituals across numerous ways of …show more content…
Overall, women take the other person’s emotions into account when communicating and men try to take the one-up position, however, both sexes expect the opposite sex to talk like the way that their own sex does. In other words men expect women to talk like men and women expect men to talk like women. Women are perceived as more likeable by men if they joke the way males do because men expect women to act like them. Tannen states, “women are perceived as more serious and liked by men more,” when they “learn to joke the way guys do” (Tannen 337). Although Tannen concludes this could be due to the group of women seeing one woman trying to get in with the bosses, it is reasonable to believe men will like and understand women who talk like they do. The men saw the woman who spoke like they did as more likeable. Therefore, men generally expect women to act the way they do. Tannen noted that both sexes expect the other to have a conversation style similar to their own, similarly, I have also noticed this concept through my own personal experiences. I am sometimes perceived as rude or inattentive because I show little emotion and barely take the other person’s feeling’s into account when communicating. Since they expect me to have a conversation style similar to their own, mostly women have told me I need to show more emotion when talking. Women notice emotions more than men because they are constantly taking them into account when communicating. Consequently, they notice my lack of emotion more so than men. I am expected to show more emotion by females; therefore, females expect men to adopt a communication style more like their own. Both men and women expect others to have similar conversation rituals to their