Can't we talk?

 The intentions of Deborah Tannen in the article of ‘Can’t we talk’ are to present her linguistic knowledge on the difference between the conversation styles of men and women so as to enhance communication and reduce misunderstandings.

The pattern that that she chose to adopt to present her knowledge is to compare men and women’s differential analysis despite the identical words and context it is being played.   

I find Tannen’s article an easy read because of the simple language used and the everyday stories in life that I can relate to or even imagine easily.  I like her organization of the article because she uses headers i.e. the different ideas between men and women e.g. Independence and intimacy, to present her points.  These headers provided a clear platform to state her points and context clearly and more importantly helped her achieved her aims of showcasing her linguistic knowledge of differential conversation styles between men and women.

Another plus point of the Tannen’s article is her objectivity in presenting perspectives of both sides of the coin – how men and women on their own, analyse the same set of words in the given context differently that leads to conflicts.  In addition to that, she writes about possible solutions to help both genders avoid such possible conflicts in future.  This greatly helped to achieve her intentions of written this article to help men and women to reduce conversational misunderstandings.

Despite the positivity of her article, I constantly ponder over the deeper causation of such difference in men and women’s conversation cues.  Tannen mentioned in her article that the conversation styles of men and women differ because both genders and bounded by different conversation rules e.g. men converse to demonstrate power and dominance while women converse to seek confirmation and encouragement.  However, she failed to address the roots of such behaviour. 

In my opinion, the difference in conversation cues between men and women can be attributed to many reasons such as culture, particular relationship of the men and women, broader context e.g. workplace instead of solely a couple scenario has illustrated by Tannen in her article.  In a patriarchal society, which in my opinion is the basis of Tannen’s perspective towards men and women’s conversation styles, we often hear of male dominance in the family or society.  This often leads to the case study of ‘Independence and intimacy’ where John upsets Linda when he made the decision to having a house guest without consulting Linda and when faced with a confrontation, he responded “I can’t tell my friend, ‘I’ve to ask my wife for her permission’!”.  On the other hand, in a matriarchal society, the mother of the family may play the same role as John in a patriarchal society.  The culture of a society shapes people and their behaviour.  Conversation styles are a part of behaviour which suggests women in a matriarchal society may display male’s dominance in a context and definitely male conversational styles naturally.  This implies to me that cultures across space may influence men and women’s behaviour more than simply attributing differences in conversational styles to that of gender.

If a broader context of communication between men and women e.g. in family, workplaces, political scenarios were given, it will certainly make Tannen’s article more convincing and less critical.  Whats more, her aims of her article is to present her linguistic knowledge on the difference between the conversation styles of men and women so as to enhance communication and reduce misunderstandings; so why should the illustrations be confined to mostly couple-talks instead of a broader context?