Miscommunication Deborah Tannen Summary
Deborah Tannen once said, “Conversation between women and men is cross-cultural communication.” By this, she is trying to explain that both men and women speak in different manners. The same exact thing applies to age, ethnicity, gender, race, geography, subculture, language, and occupation. The way one perceives their words is distinguished by their past along with various other reasoning’s. It’s also part of our human nature to adapt to certain communication styles based on the ways we were brought up as children and the environments we stayed in throughout life. Beside communication, miscommunication also occurs with these differences in language. There are multiple things that can be misconstrued from daily conversations between people.
One of the reasons this occurs is something as simple as slang. Certain words that can be completely harmless to some teenage subcultures can be a complete insult to someone of an older age. Diverse cultures also speak another way and have different ways of showing emotions, which also leads to miscommunications. One race that demonstrates that fact is Italians; they have the predisposition to raise their voice unknowingly even when only slightly agitated, leading a person to believe that they are truthfully irate. Social class is one more problem with miscommunications. Upper class citizens typically have the inclination to think as if they are speaking at a more knowledgeable level than possibly someone of a very low class who has not had as much education as the opposite. For that reason, occasionally the “lower class” individual feels as if the upper class citizen is acting as a superior in life to them, while making the “lower class” individual feel lesser than an equal. With that being said, miscommunications happen on a daily basis. It is a worldwide problem that affects millions of people, and is extremely common. Within time, with more research, and with more observation, we can learn more about the ways words can be misleading and work towards broadening the way we speak to others.
One of the reasons this occurs is something as simple as slang. Certain words that can be completely harmless to some teenage subcultures can be a complete insult to someone of an older age. Diverse cultures also speak another way and have different ways of showing emotions, which also leads to miscommunications. One race that demonstrates that fact is Italians; they have the predisposition to raise their voice unknowingly even when only slightly agitated, leading a person to believe that they are truthfully irate. Social class is one more problem with miscommunications. Upper class citizens typically have the inclination to think as if they are speaking at a more knowledgeable level than possibly someone of a very low class who has not had as much education as the opposite. For that reason, occasionally the “lower class” individual feels as if the upper class citizen is acting as a superior in life to them, while making the “lower class” individual feel lesser than an equal. With that being said, miscommunications happen on a daily basis. It is a worldwide problem that affects millions of people, and is extremely common. Within time, with more research, and with more observation, we can learn more about the ways words can be misleading and work towards broadening the way we speak to others.