The book "You Just Don't Understand" by Deborah Tannen mainly talks about the two different ways men and women think, speak, and interpret the words and actions of others in a conversation. In the beginning of the book, Tannen says that she believes that men see the world as a constant contest where he must always defend his position from others and advance forward, and women see the world as a constant struggle to prevent others from pushing them away and to get closer and more intimate with others. For both, conversations are "negotiations" to do those things. For the majority of the rest of the book, she talks about how these two different "genderlects" develop as people grow up, she talks about how and why the two genderlects work when two men or two women talk to each other and why and how the two can come into conflict when they interact with each other, and she supports these points by giving many real-life, sometimes personal, examples as well as experiments and observations that many other linguists and anthropologists made.
I think that Tannen's book is very strong because she uses a lot of real-life examples that people who are reading it can relate to. She uses scenarios and conversations that many people might have faced in their lives, and give detailed and yet simple explanations on why someone said something and why something had happened. One thing I wished that she wrote about is how and why parents and teachers seem to encourage the development of the two genderlects. I also wished that she explored is the topic of how the two genderlects evolved into what they are today in the long history of gender inequality, just as Yule talked a lot about history in many parts of his book. I really thought that historical content would have made Tannen's book even better, since gender inequality has existed for a very long time, and therefore different genderlects also may have existed and evolved with gender inequality.
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