Deborah Tannen
Deborah Tannen
Deborah Frances Tannenis an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth7 June 1945
CountryUnited States of America
responsibility thinking
Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.
ideas different world
But if you parry individuals points - a negative and defensive enterprise - you never step back and actively imagine a world in which a different system of ideas could be true - a positive act.
mean people littles
Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.
teacher winning ideas
[T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea . . . setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.
heart discord dichotomy
False dichotomies are often at the heart of discord.
equal-treatment people ifs
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
girl way obvious
Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.
communication life-is conversation
Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.
war taken fighting
It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.
baseball men talking
Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.
sex communication men
The Pavlovian view of women voters - plug the words in, and they will respond - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. But there's a difference between a private conversation and a presidential election, between what we want from our leaders.
running two-sides long
When people realize that in the long run you may be turning off the audiences more, even though they will look temporarily--in the end they turn away, we really need to develop other metaphors and not talk about two sides, but talk about all sides.
keys understanding might
The key to conversation at work is flexibility and understanding how what you say might be perceived by others.
people effort tears
Words can be like weapons of destruction: It takes so much effort, and the cooperation of so many people, to build something - and so little effort of so few to tear it down.