The end of my book....

            In the final chapters of this book Tannen seems to put more emphasis on “genderlect” and how men and women have different approaches when it comes to speaking. Tannen refers to a work setting and how in a particular story the woman was the boss and  a man that worked for her didn’t like how she ran things but the women loved the fact that the boss actually listened to what people had to say. The man wanted the boss to be more forceful and less sensitive because that’s probably how he would have approached things if he was the boss. Tannen also explains how the use of language shows power. She uses the example of middle school girls and a married couple. The example with the middle school girls the popular girl would use hurtful words to put another girl down and show status. As for the married couple example the husband seemed to show his power by being silent. It drove his wife crazy and she was doing everything to try and get him to speak to her but nothing would work. Tannen also talks about how women seem to say “sorry” a lot. This was my favorite part because I found it to be so true. Women tend to say sorry for a lot of things as if they were apologizing for doing something wrong and most of the time that is not the case.  A quote that I found that supports this is one speaking about a 12 year old Japanese girl who writes to her grandmother about her grandfather’s death. “She began in the appropriate way: “I’m so sorry that Grandfather died.” But then she stopped and looked at what she had written. “That doesn’t sound right,” she said to her mother. “I didn’t kill him”’ (Tannen 233).If I could write to Deborah Tannen I wouldn’t really ask her any questions because the way she wrote the book is very straight forward but I would tell her that through her writing I was able to conclude that through our language she can depict so many things such as power, care, annoyance, arrogance, love. Also, the ways we speak comes a lot from our gender, females and males use words differently and makes it easy for a person to differentiate if a male is speaking or a female is speaking. The two questions I have about the nature of language is what makes boys and girls realize that they need to speak differently from each other? Why is it so hard for men and women communicate in the same way?