Communication

Laura P. Bailey

Professor Drake

English 111

Compare/Contrast Essay: Final Draft

7 July 2009

Communication

Communication is one of the main factors of building a healthy relationship. It can be a spoken word, the touch of a familiar hand, or the change of facial expression, yet so many people experience difficulty trying to master these basic skills. Leah Hager Cohen and Deborah Tannen are two authors who firmly grasp the importance of communication for building bonds with others. Cohen's "Words Left Unspoken" and Tannen's "Sex, Lies, and Conversation" are both based primarily on nonstandard forms of communication; However, Cohen gives her own personal example of a relationship with a deaf relative, while Tannen directs her writing to a mental communication block based on learned habits and experience.

Cohen's narrative version of a lesson in communication is mainly based on her experience with her deaf grandfather during her childhood. She gives many details about the physical cues she picked up on from him and how these gestures allowed them to communicate silently. Although she was unable to "speak" fluent sign language, Cohen managed to communicate effectively with her grandfather using their body language. If not for her ability to read his clues and infer from them what he was trying to convey to her, the bond between them might have been much more difficult to create.

"That was the longest conversation we ever had," (Cohen 170). Cohen stated to illustrate the importance of their silent talks together with one specific memory in which she and her grandfather were walking home together one evening and she took his hand. The reader can infer from this statement the effectiveness of their physical interaction. Cohen concludes the essay with "Now everything seems like a clue," (Cohen 170). which is her way of saying each little action her grandfather committed may have meant something more than it implied on its own. Tannen also points out how many signals and cues can represent an idea and how little people pick up on each day, based on their life experience with communication.

A simple repetition of certain actions, movements, and signals learned as a language is especially prevalent in family relationships. Simply misunderstanding certain signs is an easy way to end up not using them at all. Tannen refers to the "social structure of peer interactions" (Tannen 441) for evidence of a lack of cue reading in relationships between men and women, especially married couples. Communication between men and women can be analogous with communication between cultures, which can include race, creed, or religion. In these types of situations the primary factor of effectively conveying a message is nonverbal communication through body language.

Tannen