You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation »

Ever since she published her breakthrough book, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Deborah Tannen has established herself as a foremost expert on the art of communication throughout the world. With the publication of You re Wearing That?, Tannen takes on one of the most complex relationships in the family structure.

Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words.

Spending nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at number one, You Just Don't Understand is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.

Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong — and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.

Publishers Weekly

Georgetown University linguistics professor Tannen here ponders gender-based differences that, she claims, define and distinguish male and female communication. Opening with the rationale that ignoring such differences is more dangerous than blissful, she asserts that for most women conversation is a way of connecting and negotiating. Thus, their parleys tend to center on expressions of and responses to feelings, or what the author labels ``rapport-talk'' (private conversation). Men, on the other hand, use conversation to achieve or maintain social status; they set out to impart knowledge (termed ``report-talk,'' or public speaking). Calling on her research into the workings of dialogue, Tannen examines the functioning of argument and interruption, and convincingly supports her case for the existence of ``genderlect,'' contending that the better we understand it, the better our chances of bridging the communications gap integral to the battle of the sexes. (June)