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Deborah Tannen Sex Lies And Conversation Summary

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Everyday thousands of people communicate with one another. These conversations happen nearly instantaneously between people and are a key to a successful relationship. In Deborah Tannen’s essay, “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” she explains the differences between men and women’s communication patterns. In Tannen’s essay, she uses documented research, vocabulary, and figurative language to help draw in as well as inform her readers’ about different gender communication patterns. “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” is an article about the different communication patterns associated with males and females. Tannen explains how males and females communicate as young boys and girls, with others of the same gender, and how the different genders place and express themselves while communicating. Tannen even goes to say that talk between men and women is, “like cross-cultural communication” (424). She …show more content…

One of the more prominent demonstrations of when she used an analogy was, “for women, as for girls, intimacy is the fabric of relationships, and talk is the thread from which it is woven”, she uses this to show how women think talking is the cornerstone of relationships (424). The sentence can be translated into talk being the base of intimacy that relationships are built upon. An instance when Tannen used a metaphor was, “…a virtual epidemic of failed conversation” which describes the millions of cases of divorces each year (424). An epidemic is a widespread appearance of an infectious disease, and while Tannen is not saying that divorce is an infectious disease, but rather that divorce is a wide spreading “disease” of failed conversations. Tannen’s use of figurative language helped give her writing depth. I especially like her metaphors, because they helped to wrap things up, but to also say many things at the same

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