Summary Of You Just Don T Understand By Deborah Tannen

If I had a million bucks, I’d pay Deborah Tannen to sit by me at all times, providing simultaneous translation, in her graceful, intelligent, and persuasive way, of what people are really saying when I think they’re saying something else. Not having a million bucks, I rely on her books — popular, accessible, inviting presentations that make scholarly research look like the most fun a girl can have short of movie reviewing — as guides to communication. In You Just Don’t Understand, Tannen analyzed male and female conversational styles without once needing to rely on Mars and Venus as planetary shorthand; in Talking From 9 to 5 she illuminated what goes on at the office. Now, with the empathy of a therapist and the authority of a linguistics professor (at Georgetown), Tannen stretches her scholarship further outward. In The Argument Culture, she studies the prevalent American form of public discourse — debate — and suggests that the format has run amok.
But the old Greeks probably never envisioned a populace hooked on metaphors of battle (the war on drugs, the war on poverty), where charting who’s up and who’s down is a public sport engaged in by the media, encouraged by politicians, monitored by lawyers, and consumed by increasingly cynical citizens. ”The culture of critique,” Tannen explains, ”undermines the spirit not only of people in public roles but of those who read about them, afraid to believe in anyone or anything because the next story…will tell them why they