But What Do You Mean By Deborah Tannen

In Deborah Tannen’s article, “But What Do You Mean?” Tannen exchanges her view on seven topics of a predicament in a communication between both men and women. The seven topics which are apologies, criticism, thank-you’s, fighting, praise, complaints, and jokes. In this article, Tannen focuses on women mostly as her primary examples, such as giving more examples of women’s misinterpreting and miscommunicating in conversations. However, I believe that her article is too old and that her claims about the ways men and women communicate are too rigid. Therefore, in this essay, I will share my encounters in these three topics, apologies, criticism, and fighting. In Tannen’s first article, she goes over a few miscommunications involving apologies.

Tannen implies that “It has its own logic however, and neither style is intrinsically better. People who prefer criticism given straight are operating on an assumption that feelings aren’t involved.” When everything becomes disoriented, finding a nice way to criticize an employee’s work can cause problems in the hair salon. At times like this, the criticism needs to be austere and terse, though not necessarily oppressive. As I was finishing my client, cleaning the hairs off their neck and taking off the hair cape, my manager came up to me and said, “Hurry up. There are more people waiting for this chair.” Sure he could have come up with a nicer way of telling me, but it wasn’t necessary for I did not get offended. I simply cleaned up the car styling chair and my things a little quicker so I can take the next client. My manager Alberto is a friendly person and I know he considers our feelings. At least most of the time. However, for the sake of taking in clients sooner and not having them wait long, he gets to the point and later appreciates our hard work with some sort of reward or

This article was written over a decade ago and although her article was used as a guidebook to some people, it mostly helped women understand why they are more sensitive when it comes to having conversations involving the male population. However, in present time, women are taking lead roles. We are apologizing less, have a better understanding of directness, which is sometimes more efficient to get things done, and lastly that we are not afraid to voice our opinions or beliefs and stand up to men's own