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any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life.
Deborah Tannen
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Deborah Tannen
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 7
Linguist
Professor
University Teacher
Brooklyn
New York
Deborah Frances Tannen
Words
Criticism
Secondhand
Seems
Worse
Strike
Would
Seem
Spoken
Life
Heard
Larger
People
Powerful
Strikes
Face
Reputation
Faces
Sounds
Sound
Presence
More quotes by Deborah Tannen
The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.
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The key to conversation at work is flexibility and understanding how what you say might be perceived by others.
Deborah Tannen
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
Deborah Tannen
All conversation, in addition to whatever else it does, displays, and asks for recognition of, our competence.
Deborah Tannen
[T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea . . . setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.
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To say that a person feels listened to means a lot more than just their ideas get heard. It's a sign of respect. It makes people feel valued.
Deborah Tannen
All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.
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Part of the reason images of women in positions of authority are marked by their gender is that the very notion of authority is associated with maleness.
Deborah Tannen
Words can be like weapons of destruction: It takes so much effort, and the cooperation of so many people, to build something - and so little effort of so few to tear it down.
Deborah Tannen
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.
Deborah Tannen
Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.
Deborah Tannen
The chivalrous man who holds a door open or signals a woman to go ahead of him when he's driving is negotiating both status and connection.
Deborah Tannen
Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.
Deborah Tannen
Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight.
Deborah Tannen
In dialogue, there is opposition, yes, but no head-on collision. Smashing heads does not open minds.
Deborah Tannen
Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.
Deborah Tannen
When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.
Deborah Tannen
It can be the best of relationships and the worst of relationships - often at the same time. The bond between a mother and daughter is one of the strongest, but it's also among the most complicated.
Deborah Tannen
In an ongoing relationship, each current criticism packs the punches of all the others that have gone before.
Deborah Tannen
Like most men, my father is interested in action. And this is why he disappoints my mother when she tells him she doesn't feel well and he offers to take her to the doctor. He is focused on what he can do, whereas she wants sympathy.
Deborah Tannen
