D. B. Guin's Reviews > That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

This book used a narrative style that reminded me a lot of Chapman's love language books: the short explanation of the concept in general, and then two or three little stories about "John and Marcy" told to exemplify the concept. It's very easy to digest, easy to understand, and for how short and brief this book is, I think it manages to get across quite a few complex concepts.

The core message (that misunderstandings are more likely to be due to difference in style than real ill will, and that while communication styles may be different none of them are morally superior) is a good one. Although it did somewhat depress me. As a person who CAN. NOT. continue talking if I'm being talked over or interrupted, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to pull off the magical transformation one of her example guys did, by just plunging in and becoming one with the gleeful yelling match. And I do still feel like the "but you have to get me something for my birthday that shows you Know Me Really Well without any input from me because if you need me to give you a birthday list you must not truly care/know me" person is needy and unrealistic and should chill.

In that vein, a lot of this book felt like putting a microscope to a problem that by its very nature is hopeless to fix. Intellectually interesting, but leaving you nothing to do afterward but throw up your hands and accept your doom. Hoping all things about people's motives while trying to be conscious of different cultural communication expectations has left me paranoid and jumping at shadow metamessages. I end up paralyzed into doing what I would have done anyway, and hoping everyone has grace for me and my screw-ups. I wish there was an answer for this, but I don't think there is one, and it's not in this book at any rate.

I mentioned how brief That's Not What I Meant is. In this version, it's barely over 200 pages. Partially constrained by its need to be small enough and simple enough to be accessible, and partially constrained by the nature of socio-linguistics as among the softest of soft sciences, this book is pretty essentialist. That's mostly unavoidable, and I think for what it is, That's Not What I Meant does a decent job at nuance and disclaimer. But it is definitely essentialist in the way that my entry-level Crosscultural Communications class was pretty essentialist. You learn all the stuff about "high context" and "low context" cultures first off, so that later you can study how they stand up or break down when applied to real life.

Some of Tannen's chapters remind me of the sweeping generalizations in my CCC textbook, especially her chapters about male and female communication. The temptation with pop psychology/sociology/personality tests/linguistics is to construct some kind of airtight worldview, artificially forcing everyone into the boxes transcribed by the book. As long as you can avoid that and take broad theoretical constructs for what they are -- approximations with value only inasmuch as they are useful -- then this book has some fascinating insights to share.