There are a lot of statements going around about how men cannot understand women and vice versa. This problem is merely from how men and women communicate. Miscommunication may lead to any misunderstanding and then new problems are made. Some women accuse how men never understand their feeling. In the other hand, some men also accuse that women is hard to understand. How could this happen?
The book by Allan and Barbara Pease, "Why men don't listen and women can't read maps." shows that men and women play different roles in life. This book also supported Alfie Kohn’s article about “Sex and Status and a Manner of Speaking” that stated “Men and women in our culture exhibit distinctive styles of speech and also tend to play different roles in conversation”
Men and Women are surely has different styles of speech and different roles in conversation. The differences of the characteristics that were built by the society may influence this differences. Surely, every society have different gender roles that form different characteristics. In this case, in countries where English is used as their mother tongue, there are a great distinctive style of speech between men and women.
The basic differences are when women are perceived as tentative, men tend to dominate. The evidences for this differences can be seen in the research conducted by Charles Derber. He is a sociologist that proves men often shift conversations to their preferred topics and listened less well and less to actively bring women out about women’s topic. While the women play their supportive roles to draw others out and even give the active encouragement.
Moreover, in the next research, it is also shows that men like to interrupt women in a mixed-sex conversation. Further, the women usually start the conversation tentatively, while men like to talk about their topic.
There are also another characteristics. Women have their own characteristic in speech, they used some question and question tags in conversation even though they are not seeking the answer and they also used some double force in pronounce some words to ensure the listeners. In the other hand, men also have some characteristics, they put their topic as the first priority that’s why they like to interrupt others topic. Yet, in other circumstances, the roles of communication may change, but the need to complete each other roles in communication have to be fulfilled, right?
In conclusion, the gender in communication has a great influences on their style of speaking. Thus, male-female speech has its own ‘special’ role in conversation. In fact, they complete each other. This may give us some clue how to understand each other in communication and how to bridge those different characteristics that each gender has. Therefore, miscommunication can be avoided for a better communication, or at least, minimize the misunderstanding.
n.b This is my Past two year's writing. I apologized for any kind of grammatical error. I would gladly accept any kind of suggestion to improve my writing. :)
