That's Not What I Meant ! By Deborah Tannen Summary

In an attempt to analyze conversational differences between genders in her book, That’s Not What I Meant!, Deborah Tannen discusses many claims that may not hold true in all cases in current society. While I found that Tannen’s section on gendered socialization differences among children to be partly accurate, her claims about differing interests in conversation and acknowledgment of details in conversation between men and women are not necessarily true.

Tannen (1986) includes a section on “growing up male and female” which aside from the generalization that “between the ages of five and fifteen… [children] play mostly with friends of their own sex” (p. 142) is mostly true from my experience. The reason why that particular claim is not completely correct is because growing up, I socialized more with girls than with boys. This gave me an opportunity to see both sides of the socialization patterns. To differentiate the styles of socialization between boys and girls, Tannen (1986) uses the findings from anthropologists Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker (p. 142). When analyzing how girls socialize with each other, they generally “play in small groups or… in pairs,” (p. 142) that are close enough to where it’s difficult for an outsider to be included, but when they do manage to gain inclusion, they

According to Tannen (1986), women “often include reports of conversations” (p. 147) in which they recount the experience in great detail including “tone of voice, intonation, and wording” (p. 147). Men, however, “give a brief summary instead of recreating what was said and how” (p. 147) causing women to feel that they are lacking an essence in their retelling. She continues by saying that when men do not provide such details expected by women, these women suspect that they are “only pretending not to remember”, while men assume that women are “making up the details” (p.