Deborah Tannen
Deborah Tannen
Deborah Frances Tannenis an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth7 June 1945
CountryUnited States of America
country religious growing-up
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 ...
fighting views argument
Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight.
powerful people criticism
any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life.
criticism ongoing gone
In an ongoing relationship, each current criticism packs the punches of all the others that have gone before.
men focus independence
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.
men decision natural
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.
mean people littles
Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.
teacher winning ideas
[T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea . . . setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.
equal-treatment people ifs
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
girl way obvious
Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.
communication life-is conversation
Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.
war taken fighting
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.
sex communication men
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.
running two-sides long
When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.