The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Deborah Tannen

Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other’s.

Her, Own, Other

Relationships are made of talk – and talk is for girls and women.

Relationships, Talk, Made

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Language, Conversation

In a world of status, independence is key, because a primary means of establishing status is to tell others what to do, and taking orders is a marker of low status. Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. It is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions.

Women, Focus, World

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.

Mother, Enemy, Daughters

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.

Women, Man, Words

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

Alone, World, Independence

Communication is a continual balancing act juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world we have to act in concert with others but to survive as ourselves rather than simply as cogs in a wheel we have to act alone.

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

communication, communication-quotes, understanding