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Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends
This revised edition of Deborah Tannen's first discourse analysis book, Conversational Style --first published in 1984--presents an approach to analyzing conversation that later became the hallmark and foundation of her extensive body of work in discourse analysis, including the monograph Talking Voices, as well as her well-known popular books You Just Don't Understand, That's Not What I Meant!, and Talking from 9 to 5, among others.
Carefully examining the discourse of six speakers over the course of a two-and-a-half hour Thanksgiving dinner conversation, Tannen analyzes the features that make up the speakers' conversational styles, and in particular how aspects of what she calls a 'high-involvement style' have a positive effect when used with others who share the style, but a negative effect with those whose styles differ. This revised edition includes a new preface and an afterword in which Tannen discusses the book's place in the evolution of her work.
Conversational Style is written in an accessible and non-technical style that should appeal to scholars and students of discourse analysis (in fields like linguistics, anthropology, communication, sociology, and psychology) as well as general readers fascinated by Tannen's popular work. This book is an ideal text for use in introductory classes in linguistics and discourse analysis.
Carefully examining the discourse of six speakers over the course of a two-and-a-half hour Thanksgiving dinner conversation, Tannen analyzes the features that make up the speakers' conversational styles, and in particular how aspects of what she calls a 'high-involvement style' have a positive effect when used with others who share the style, but a negative effect with those whose styles differ. This revised edition includes a new preface and an afterword in which Tannen discusses the book's place in the evolution of her work.
Conversational Style is written in an accessible and non-technical style that should appeal to scholars and students of discourse analysis (in fields like linguistics, anthropology, communication, sociology, and psychology) as well as general readers fascinated by Tannen's popular work. This book is an ideal text for use in introductory classes in linguistics and discourse analysis.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
22 people are currently reading
741 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Tannen
59 books329 followersDeborah Tannen is best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, which was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nearly four years years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into 29 languages. It was also on best seller lists in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, and Hong Kong. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness. Her book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work , a New York Times Business Best Seller, does for the workplace what the earlier book did for women and men talking at home. She has also made a training video, Talking 9 to 5. Her book, The Argument Culture, received the Common Ground Book Award. Her book, I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You're All Adults, received a Books for a Better Life Award. Her latest book, You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, was recently published in paperback by Ballantine; it spent ten weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List after its initial publication in 2006.
Deborah Tannen is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows. In connection with You're Wearing THAT? she appeared on 20/20, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Rachael Ray Talk Show, the CBS Early Show, and on NPR's Morning Edition and the Diane Rehm show. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 48 Hours, CBS News, ABC World News Tonight, Oprah, CNN, Larry King, Hardball, Nightline, and NPR are among the major television and radio shows on which Dr. Tannen has appeared in connection with previous books. She has been featured in and written for most major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, People, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.
Dr. Tannen has lectured all over the world. Her audiences have included corporations such as Corning, Chevron, Motorola, Rolm (Siemens), McKinsey and Co., and Delta, as well as the Board of Trustees of The Wharton School and a gathering of United States senators and their spouses. Combining the results of years of research and observation with videotaped real-life footage of office interaction, Dr. Tannen gives her audiences a new framework for understanding what happens in conversations both in the workplace and at home.
In addition to her linguistic research and writing, Dr. Tannen has published poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Her first play, "An Act of Devotion," is included in The Best American Short Plays: 1993-1994. It was produced, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theatre in Arlington, Virginia in 1995.
Deborah Tannen is on the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown University, where she is one of only two in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published twenty-one books and over 100 articles and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates. Dr. Tannen is a member of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board and the Board of Horizons Theatre.
Deborah Tannen is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows. In connection with You're Wearing THAT? she appeared on 20/20, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Rachael Ray Talk Show, the CBS Early Show, and on NPR's Morning Edition and the Diane Rehm show. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 48 Hours, CBS News, ABC World News Tonight, Oprah, CNN, Larry King, Hardball, Nightline, and NPR are among the major television and radio shows on which Dr. Tannen has appeared in connection with previous books. She has been featured in and written for most major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, People, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.
Dr. Tannen has lectured all over the world. Her audiences have included corporations such as Corning, Chevron, Motorola, Rolm (Siemens), McKinsey and Co., and Delta, as well as the Board of Trustees of The Wharton School and a gathering of United States senators and their spouses. Combining the results of years of research and observation with videotaped real-life footage of office interaction, Dr. Tannen gives her audiences a new framework for understanding what happens in conversations both in the workplace and at home.
In addition to her linguistic research and writing, Dr. Tannen has published poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Her first play, "An Act of Devotion," is included in The Best American Short Plays: 1993-1994. It was produced, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theatre in Arlington, Virginia in 1995.
Deborah Tannen is on the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown University, where she is one of only two in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published twenty-one books and over 100 articles and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates. Dr. Tannen is a member of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board and the Board of Horizons Theatre.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 1, 2007
This book would probably be considered more for the academic than the layman; it is difficult to approach and a highly involved read. Nonetheless, for anyone interested in the dynamics of human interaction through language, its insights are indispensable. If you've ever found yourself wondering about conversation, even in the most general terms, this book is a good place to find the premises and assumptions unspoken in dialogue among friends.
September 1, 2014
Conversational analysis at its finest, but also a weird self-reflective experience, wherein my fascination with the lives of the people whose talking styles Tannen is analysing (including her own), forces me to consider how I relish "gossip", even when it has nothing to do with me. All people who talk to other people should read this book.
November 17, 2014
This is a fantastic book for those who want to analyse daily conversations at a deeper level. I thought I'd never finish this book, however, Deborah makes it so interesting and relevant that I want to read more on the topic. Discourse Analysis/Conversation Analysis is a difficult concept and this book helps ease the pain of trying to understand it.
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August 6, 2011Njaa njuu...mielenkiintosta,mutta suppeata..mutta ehkäpä tämä auttaa ymmärtämään ihmisten erilaisia keskustelutyylejä ja olemaan vetämättä niistä hätiköityjä johtopäätöksiä motiiveista...
March 28, 2012
I not only studied the earlier edition of this book for my thesis long ago--I enjoyed it.
June 9, 2021
As this is my first foray into discourse analysis, I don't have a strong opinion here. Tannen clearly took great care writing this in 1984 such that it's readable, with its popularizing intent intact. Conversational Style is specifically an analysis of the patterns of conversation over a two hour span among her and her friends one Thanksgiving. It's a limitation she acknowledges in the book and so doesn't interfere with her core takeaway: one can breakdown conversational styles between "high-considerateness" & and "high-involvement." So, broadly speaking, the former is defined by active engagement (interrupting, overlapping speech, etc) and the latter by passive engagement (waiting turns, slower speech, etc).
While she make sure to note that neither is better than the other and that success if measured purely by the ability of people to successfully communicate & establish rapport among one another, the book frames this distinction through Gregory Bateson's idea of the "double bind." The two ends of this bind are "the need to be connected to other people and the need to be independent. The need to be connected to other people comes from the danger of isolation." I can't formulate exactly why I'm uncomfortable with this idea. Maybe because it seems belied by the joie de vivre of the conversation she references, a Freudian framework stapled onto something far more prosocial?
I'm not sure framing communication as an attempt to prevent erasure, either from absence to society or being overwritten by other people's identities, is the proper lens. Especially since, in the 2004 reprint chapter 9 coda, Tannen points the reader to her later book Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse which "presents a comprehensive model of what might be called a poetics, or aesthetics, of conversational discourse." Which produces this (to me) weird clash of analyzing conversation as a literary product while seeing it as a psychosocial struggle for identity. I'm no linguist though.
That I largely forgot about this framing until the end of the book is a testament to how solidly constructed the book is. Maybe the roughest chapters are 4 & 5, which are rough only because they make up nearly half the book and with slightly denser linguistic analysis. Still readable, however. This is definitely worth a peruse if you're casually interested in this topic.
While she make sure to note that neither is better than the other and that success if measured purely by the ability of people to successfully communicate & establish rapport among one another, the book frames this distinction through Gregory Bateson's idea of the "double bind." The two ends of this bind are "the need to be connected to other people and the need to be independent. The need to be connected to other people comes from the danger of isolation." I can't formulate exactly why I'm uncomfortable with this idea. Maybe because it seems belied by the joie de vivre of the conversation she references, a Freudian framework stapled onto something far more prosocial?
I'm not sure framing communication as an attempt to prevent erasure, either from absence to society or being overwritten by other people's identities, is the proper lens. Especially since, in the 2004 reprint chapter 9 coda, Tannen points the reader to her later book Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse which "presents a comprehensive model of what might be called a poetics, or aesthetics, of conversational discourse." Which produces this (to me) weird clash of analyzing conversation as a literary product while seeing it as a psychosocial struggle for identity. I'm no linguist though.
That I largely forgot about this framing until the end of the book is a testament to how solidly constructed the book is. Maybe the roughest chapters are 4 & 5, which are rough only because they make up nearly half the book and with slightly denser linguistic analysis. Still readable, however. This is definitely worth a peruse if you're casually interested in this topic.
December 23, 2022
Explained my whole life to me - explains how people talk differently and how this leads to either rapport or frustration. Big ideas:
Goal of conversation is for the speaker's intention to be understood. But if conversational styles differ, this won't happen.
"[A]ll utterances are both 'deficient' and 'exuberant.' They are deficient in that they fail to communicate precisely and entirely what a speaker intends, and they are exuberant in that they communicate more than a speaker intends" (p. 189).
High-involvement vs. high-considerateness speakers. High-involvement speakers:
1. Topic
a. Prefer personal topics
b. Shift topics abruptly
c. Introduce topics without hesitation
d. Persist (if a new topic is not immediately picked up,
reintroduce it, repeatedly if necessary)
2. Pacing
a. Faster rate of speech
b. Faster turn taking
c. Avoiding interturn pauses (silence shows lack of rapport)
d. Cooperative overlap
e. Participatory listenership
3. Narrative strategies
a. Tell more stories
b. Tell stories in rounds
c. Prefer internal evaluation (i.e., the point of a story is
dramatized rather than lexicalized)
4. Expressive paralinguistics
a. Expressive phonology
b. Marked pitch and amplitude shifts
c. Marked voice quality
d. Strategic within-turn pauses
Most of the book illustrates what happens when you put high-involvement and high-considerateness speakers in a room together and the confusion and hurt that ensue.
"In communication, [the] two commands are the need to be connected to other people and the need to be independent. The need to be connected to other people comes from the danger of isolation. On a very real level, a human being alone could die. But there is also a danger in connection. If human beings get too close, the needs and wants of others can be imposing, or even engulfing, and again the individual could die, at least as an individual. We do not want to feel alone in the world, but we do not want to be engulfed by others either. Human relationships become a matter of balancing the need for involvement with other people and the need to be independent; in other words, we juggle the need for and danger of being close" (p. 4).
Goal of conversation is for the speaker's intention to be understood. But if conversational styles differ, this won't happen.
"[A]ll utterances are both 'deficient' and 'exuberant.' They are deficient in that they fail to communicate precisely and entirely what a speaker intends, and they are exuberant in that they communicate more than a speaker intends" (p. 189).
High-involvement vs. high-considerateness speakers. High-involvement speakers:
1. Topic
a. Prefer personal topics
b. Shift topics abruptly
c. Introduce topics without hesitation
d. Persist (if a new topic is not immediately picked up,
reintroduce it, repeatedly if necessary)
2. Pacing
a. Faster rate of speech
b. Faster turn taking
c. Avoiding interturn pauses (silence shows lack of rapport)
d. Cooperative overlap
e. Participatory listenership
3. Narrative strategies
a. Tell more stories
b. Tell stories in rounds
c. Prefer internal evaluation (i.e., the point of a story is
dramatized rather than lexicalized)
4. Expressive paralinguistics
a. Expressive phonology
b. Marked pitch and amplitude shifts
c. Marked voice quality
d. Strategic within-turn pauses
Most of the book illustrates what happens when you put high-involvement and high-considerateness speakers in a room together and the confusion and hurt that ensue.
"In communication, [the] two commands are the need to be connected to other people and the need to be independent. The need to be connected to other people comes from the danger of isolation. On a very real level, a human being alone could die. But there is also a danger in connection. If human beings get too close, the needs and wants of others can be imposing, or even engulfing, and again the individual could die, at least as an individual. We do not want to feel alone in the world, but we do not want to be engulfed by others either. Human relationships become a matter of balancing the need for involvement with other people and the need to be independent; in other words, we juggle the need for and danger of being close" (p. 4).
November 8, 2021
This is a report of an analysis done on a very specific group of people conversing around a dinner table on a special occasion...seems very narrow, and yet it offered insights into conversational styles & practices that may help readers either accept themselves or attempt to adjust their habitual conversation habits.
Tannen provides language to asses linguistic devices used & narrative strategies, including;
(Linguistic devices)
Personal vs impersonal topic choices
The enthusiasm constraint
The machine-gun question
Overlap & pace
Mutual revelation
High-involvement devices & bonding
Expressive phonology & intonation
Persistence
Tolerance for noise vs silence
(Narrative strategies)
Story rounds
Contrasting narrative strategies
Expressive vs understated evaluation & response
Getting to the point
Meaning in intonation
Cooperative vs impatient prompting
Irony & joking
I was particularly interested in "high involvement," "persistence," & "overlap," since I have been trying to modulate my habits after hearing from some people that it comes off as pushy or arrogant.
While I'm working on being a better listener, this book helped me re-frame my own behavior & see how it is appreciated & welcome & connection-building within some conversations with specific people, and is intrusive, overwhelming, or annoying within some other conversations with other specific people.
I didn't read the entire book, and I wish it would be updated again & presented for a more general audience of readers. (My star-rating is a mix; the research (as limited as it was) seems like a 4, the analysis (represented better in interviews than here!) for me was a 5, and the presentation of info here seems like a 3.)
Tannen provides language to asses linguistic devices used & narrative strategies, including;
(Linguistic devices)
Personal vs impersonal topic choices
The enthusiasm constraint
The machine-gun question
Overlap & pace
Mutual revelation
High-involvement devices & bonding
Expressive phonology & intonation
Persistence
Tolerance for noise vs silence
(Narrative strategies)
Story rounds
Contrasting narrative strategies
Expressive vs understated evaluation & response
Getting to the point
Meaning in intonation
Cooperative vs impatient prompting
Irony & joking
I was particularly interested in "high involvement," "persistence," & "overlap," since I have been trying to modulate my habits after hearing from some people that it comes off as pushy or arrogant.
While I'm working on being a better listener, this book helped me re-frame my own behavior & see how it is appreciated & welcome & connection-building within some conversations with specific people, and is intrusive, overwhelming, or annoying within some other conversations with other specific people.
I didn't read the entire book, and I wish it would be updated again & presented for a more general audience of readers. (My star-rating is a mix; the research (as limited as it was) seems like a 4, the analysis (represented better in interviews than here!) for me was a 5, and the presentation of info here seems like a 3.)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 11, 2020
Some of the information is a bit outdated for a modern reader but it did make me aware of how complex language is and how something as little as slight pauses, using a different tone and even the slight speed change can effect perception.
April 1, 2023
While a decent introduction to the subject, it always seems to choose more depth on the least interesting aspects while skimming over anything of note. Got through the entire thing desperately trying to love it and never did.
March 20, 2019
My language and linguistics class read this book. We concluded as a whole that it did not have sound studies, and broadly generalized gender.
February 2, 2022
Was not expecting a detailed analysis for each comment/conversation. Way more than what I was looking for.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews