Deborah Tannen Quotes
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More men feel comfortable doing "public speaking," while more women feel comfortable doing "private" speaking.
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Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
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We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.
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For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
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All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.
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The allure of love is to have someone who knows you so well that you don't have to explain yourself. It is the promise of someone who cares enough about you to protect you against the world of strangers who do not wish you well.
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In dialogue, there is opposition, yes, but no head-on collision. Smashing heads does not open minds.
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Many men honestly do not know what women want, and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.
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Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight.
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Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's
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The Pavlovian view of women voters - plug the words in, and they will respond - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. But there's a difference between a private conversation and a presidential election, between what we want from our leaders.
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But if you parry individuals points - a negative and defensive enterprise - you never step back and actively imagine a world in which a different system of ideas could be true - a positive act.
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In an ongoing relationship, each current criticism packs the punches of all the others that have gone before.
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The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.
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We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has
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The chivalrous man who holds a door open or signals a woman to go ahead of him when he's driving is negotiating both status and connection.
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Many women feel it is natural to consult with their partners at every turn, while many men automatically make more decisions without consulting their partners.
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All conversation, in addition to whatever else it does, displays, and asks for recognition of, our competence.
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Part of the reason images of women in positions of authority are marked by their gender is that the very notion of authority is associated with maleness.
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It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.
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Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.
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Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.
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Cooperation isn't the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict.
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Like most men, my father is interested in action. And this is why he disappoints my mother when she tells him she doesn't feel well and he offers to take her to the doctor. He is focused on what he can do, whereas she wants sympathy.
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Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication
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Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.
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When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.
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The argument culture urges us to approach the world-and the people in it-in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition over-weighted.
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Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.
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To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.
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