Deborah

ideas. Deborah Tannen in “But What Do You Mean?” most effectively displays the message to the audience that everyone must be consciously aware of the environment one speaks in as Tannen analyzes the gaps in communication between men and women. With a similar subject matter, William Lutz in “The World…

Communicating is an essential component to human life, without conversations life would be full of unknowns. Some conversations are awkward, others are tense, and some are full of happiness and commitment. During “But What Do You Mean” by Deborah Tannen, the author approaches the subject of why men and women have trouble with conversing in the workplace. Tannen uses seven different categories to classify communication problems between men and women that not only apply in the workplace but as…

Deborah Gray White, author of Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, courageously plunges into the research and understanding of the slave experience through race and gender. The overall slave experience of the antebellum South is often represented by the male experience. For the first time, White brings forth an understanding of slave life through the female lens. White reasons that the female slave experience differed from the male slave experience due to the assigned gender…

Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, written by Deborah Gray White is a project to reveal the experiences and tribulations of slaves in the antebellum South. White felt as if the lives of female slaves were inadequately represented. White states that “For black women, race and sex cannot be separated. We cannot consider who black women are as black people without considering their sex, nor can we consider who they are as women without considering their race.” (White, 6). The…

Gender in Education Who is smarter, boys or girls? Most of society would say that boys are. People view males as the dominant gender. When it comes to gender, there are differences. Deborah Tannen and Jesse J. Prinz express their opinions on gender differences by teaching styles, cultural beliefs, and the problems they pose in education. Gender can be an issue in education. Males and females tend to learn and communicate differently. Tannen, who wrote You Just Don’t Understand, has done several…

with the setting that both genders are in. There seems to be a particular time and place for each gender to have the center of attention when it comes to communication. In the article "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation" by Deborah Tannen, she explores the different situations associated with the conditions in which each gender can talk and when it is looked down upon. This article explores this issues through different sociological theories and concepts, how it is viewed…

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…

Deborah Ann Butler’s “Achieving Against the Odds: Gender, Chance and Contradiction in the Horse Racing Industry”, an article featured in The Sociology of Sport Journal, analyzes the gender inequality along with class and race in the horse racing industry. Butler considers the difference in difficulty between woman and men when it comes to achieving success through interviews, statistical support, and Bourdieu’s concept of “thinking tools”. When it comes to sports, men have shown more dominance…

In the article, “But What Do You Mean?”, author Deborah Tannen discusses what she has observed to be differences in ways that women and men communicate. She concludes by stating that neither communication style in incorrect, however, to alleviate miscommunication women and men should use language that is understood by both parties. While I do not disagree with Tannen’s observations, I find some flaws with her solution. As recent brain studies have shown, women and men are not significantly…

Is it Really Gender Difference? Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics, wrote the book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation in 1990. This book shows a chapter about Tannen’s observations of how most classroom dynamics are fundamentally male. She uses these observations of the classroom to describe how women and men behave in this environment. Her main focus being on just the two groups makes the things she observed seem very one-dimensional. Can behavior truly be…