Sex Lies And Conversation Deborah Tannen Analysis

Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women To Talk To Each Other? In the essay Sex, Lies, and Conversation, Deborah Tannen explores why marriages have such a high divorce rate and how conversation plays a key role in this. Tannen touches on many different opinions and viewpoints and supports a lot of these opinions with statistics. Her points are very clear, however the essay contains many unsupported opinions. The essay, as a whole, is very informational but also could be revised to better persuade the readers to Tannen’s viewpoints. In this essay, Tannen explains why conversation is so important in marriages and how it is a leading cause of such a high divorce rate in the United States. Tannen divides her essay into four parts to make
Tannen says these habits are formed from a very early age. She says she believes that systematic differences in childhood socialization make talk between men and women like cross-cultural communication, heir to all the attraction and pitfalls of that enticing but difficult enterprise (Tannen 101). She goes on to explain that kids typically play with children of their own gender and therefore develop sex-separate organizational structures and interactive norms. *** In the third section, Listening to Body Language, Tannen explains how men and women interpret body language differently and how this plays a big part in misunderstanding one another. When women are among other women, they usually make noises that suggest they are listening and encourage the talker to keep going. When they carry this habit into conversations with men, the men take these noises as interruptions and a sign that they are overreacting or impatient. Men are often silent listeners and tend to look around and face different directions while listening. Women interpret these habits as not listening or showing a lack of care. Also, when women talk to each other they tend to think that a conversationalists