I know it’s not the best idea to judge a book by it’s cover, most of us know that. After reading this book however, I can say it’s cover is a perfect introduction to everything this book is about. The cover features a male and female figure talking to each other, both sharing a thought bubble that says, “You just don’t understand.” Perfectly illustrating the identical frustration shared by both of them. In the broadest way of describing this book, it takes a multitude of male and female interactions and explains both parties points of view. In doing this males get an insight into the female mind and vice versa. Splitting the book into ten chapters, author Deborah Tannen explores almost every avenue of male and female conversation, explaining …show more content…
Deborah Tannen. She is a linguist professor and researcher at Georgetown University. She has been revered in her time for her work in the field as well as for her many national bestsellers on the topic, this book being her most popular. She is from New York City, New York and is of Jewish background. A fact that at first didn’t seem too important to me but with her explanation I understand now why it is. Mrs. Tannen’s approach to this book, as I can assume it is to her others as well, is one of both academic and personal interest. I say this because while she does tackle this topic in a very professional way, she also makes sure of including her personal connection with the topic. Showing us readers how much her writings means to her. For this book she decided to use a wide variety of research methods, whether they were from other people's work or her own. She also used a fair amount of personal encounters, which really made the book seem more “real worldy” for lack of a better phrase. While she did gather a lot of material for this book I would say a vast majority of it comes in the form of qualitative research. I say this because she uses a lot of things like interviews, social experiments, and observations to get data. Due to this most of the data she got was non-numerical, which makes this qualitative not quantitative. She does have some quantitative research in there like polls and surveys, but it dwarfs in