Deborah Tannen is a professor in the linguistics department at Georgetown University, and her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (2001) was on best-seller lists for years. She has also written about the ways people talk at work, with friends and siblings, and in the press, politics, academics, and law. This rhetorical analysis, adapted from Tannen’s book You’re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation (2006), is also a sociolinguistic analysis, or discourse analysis — a study of the ways language is used and how conversation structures relationships. This adapted essay first appeared in the Washington Post in 2006.

Reading the Genre

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