Rhetorical Analysis Of Who Does The Talking Here By Deborah Tannen

Rose Yi
30 October 2015
Synthesis of Deborah Tannen’s
“Who Does the Talking Here?”
In her paper, “Who Does the Talking Here?”, Deborah Tannen takes a look at the conclusion of various studies and uses real life examples to bring about a compromise on the endless argument of which gender talks the most.
Throughout her essay, Tannen mentions several different research studies on the topic of discovering whether men or women talk more. Her opening paragraphs discuss the results of two studies, one by Louann Brizendine and one by Matthias Mehl, that each attempted to calculate the amount of words spoken by each gender per day. Brizendine came up with an average of around 20,000 words per day for women, and 7,000 words per day for men, while Mehl

Of all the 70 scientific studies Tannen could have chosen to talk about, the number of which she releases later in her paper, her choice of these two serves to demonstrate how biased and varied in results the scientific studies on this topic have been in the past. This helps Tannen justify the need for her article on the subject as it gives reason to why the issue on which gender speaks more still has not yet been resolved. Later in her essay, Tannen uses the results of a survey done by Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres on the results of 70 studies published in scientific journals several times. Her first use of their results follows her statements on the studies talked about earlier in this paper, noting that they “found that counting words yielded no consistent differences”. She then goes on to say, “Campbell and Ayres note that many studies find women doing more ‘affiliative

From a study Tannen conducted, she describes the experience of a man who talked a lot in the room while his wife sat next to him dead silent, but then admitted to the importance of her wife’s personalized conversation starters later at night when they are alone, saying “She’s the talker in our family… It’s true. When we come home, she does all the talking. If she didn’t, we’d spend the evening in silence.(8)” Tannen later goes on to say “Drawing on… my own research of adults talking, I often (describe affiliative speech) this way: …(9)”. As a woman, Tannen talks uses her own personal feelings, and those of the women she’s studied, observed, and connected with to describe the female side of her conclusions. Her experiences bring the article down to a more personal level ­ something more relatable than just “the average of this” or “soandso concluded that over a period of 6 months with 10000 men and women”. Tannen’s personal references also give her credibility as someone who can give opinions and insight on this topic as it shows that she is not merely just someone reads studies and comments on them, but someone who has been in the field, doing her own research, taking down her own results, and discovering what others may or may not have in the past. It puts her in apposition of authority and