992words.Miscommunication between men and women. includes book pages for sources using Writing the World:(Cooper and MacDonald). Includes Authors Deborah Tannen and Senta Troemel-Ploetz

Essay by RahRah5885College, UndergraduateA, April 2004

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Miscommunication between Men and Women

Throughout the world men and women have difficulties communicating with each other for many reasons. There have been many books published to try to explain the misunderstandings of communication, some with far fetched ideal reasons and others with logical explanations. Although these books where written with the same concept in mind, not all of them agree with each other. Take for instance Deborah Tannen and Senta Troemel-Ploetz. Tannen believes that the reason for miscommunication between the sexes is because men and women grow up in two different cultures, whereas Troemel-Ploetz believes that the miscommunication is caused from a difference in power.

Deborah Tannen is a linguistics (a researcher of human speech and language) professor who is known for some of her best selling books about language and communication (pp 8). In Deborah Tannens essay "Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!" Rapport-Talk and Report-Talk, Tannen talks about the conversational behaviors of men and women and what reasons may cause the miscommunication link between them.

"More men feel comfortable doing "public speaking," while more women feel comfortable doing "private" speaking. Another way of capturing these differences is by using the terms report-talk and rapport-talk." (Cooper and MacDonald 10)

Tannen says that the primary conversational language among women is rapport "a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships." (pp 10) whereas the primary conversational language among men is report (public speaking) "talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order."(10) Tannens main argument was that conversation among the sexes was cross-cultural because they grew up in two different cultures. She also believed that as adults they would learn communication skills as children, therefore men usually took all the power. Tannen also continued to go on about...