Turn Taking Debate

Background of the first debate
The 2016 presidential debates were one of the series held for the 2016 U.S. presidential general election. Three debates among the core presidential candidates were planned by The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The first presidential debate for the 2016 election occurred on September 26, 2016. It was the first one in American history that attracted 84 million viewers, becoming the most-watched debate ever in the U.S history. The two main presidential candidates were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, representing the Republican and the Democracy parties respectively.
There are some reasons why the debate was famous. First, this was the first time in the U.S. history that a woman candidate had attended in a major political event.

Turn taking entails conversation and discourse organization in which one speaker begins her talk after the others have finished. It can be considered an essential communicative competence observed by all speakers. Turn taking ensures the conversation will be distributed on a fair turn-by-turn basis. To be specific, the conventional procedure of turn taking can be graphically represented with the flowchart below. Merelli (2016) claimed that “There is an unwritten rule in presidential debates—and general conversation—that people should not interrupt each other.” Based on the flowchart of how turn taking works in the conversation, it can be seen that Trump had violated the rule of turn taking. Obviously, due to his previous background as a business man, he always wants to assert power and dominate the conversation. As coined by Tannen (1984), men are perceived to grow up in competitive environment. As a result, they always try to achieve the upper hand over their rivals. Referring to Trump, in the text, he appeared to follow the very same tactic, as if he was dealing business, over