Genderlect Styles

• Deborah Tannen is an American Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

• Her research specialty is conversational style– not what people say but how they say it.

Men and women have their divergent styles in speaking. According to Tannen, this basically explains why men and women often talk past each other. In this theory, we will go deeper in understanding as to how these people of the opposite sexes differ in their conversational styles.

Women think that it is crucial to be liked by others while men feel like it is crucial to be respected by others. 

 RAPPORT TALK VS. REPORT TALK

Because women value connection, they do rapport talk.

Because men value status, they use report talk.

• Julia Wood is a communication professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the Standpoint Theory.

• She thinks that Tannen’s claims have merit and that the connection-status is evident even in childhood. 

In her book entitled Gendered Lives, she came up with key rules which boys and girls learn:

Each of these speech forms shows that women value rapport talk and men value report talk.

1. Private Speaking vs. Public Speaking

It is a cliché to say that women talk a lot than men. Well, ideally it is true. Louann Brizendine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, provides hard data that women speak an average of 20,000 words per day while men speak 7,000 words per day. However, according to Tannen, this only occurs within a private setting. In the public arena, men talk more as they contend for superiority. Simply put, women learn how to connect with others through communication while men learn to use communication to justify their ideas. 

2. When Telling A Story

3. When Listening

4. When Asking Questions

5. Conflict

6. Nonverbal Communication

      —Susan Gadoua, a licensed marriage counselor with a column in Psychology Today, learned to anticipate a common scenario when she sees a man and a woman trying to get over a serious fight.

—Sadly, Gadoua observes that when women want to connect and men want to have sex, it is often the case that neither activity takes place.