Gender and Language - Essay Example

On the other hand, men are believed to talk less, but tend to be dominant in their conversations. They also tend to talk more about businesses than personal lives as opposed to women. Holmes Janet in her article "Women Talk Too Much" and Rafelman Rachel in her article “The Party Line" make their argument on the different myths and realities about how genders communicate. This paper will analyze the effectiveness of each of these writer’s arguments. Janet Holmes (2008) in her article starts with the myth “Women talk too much” and starts by showing just how women in the society tend to converse more than men.

She argues that the reasons why it is a myth that women talk too much is because the traditional proverbs tend to argue so, many of these were created before feminism age. She sets the record straight be depicting men as the ones who out talk women. Some of the proverbs she uses in her argument to make it effective that these proverbs are the ones that still linger on people’s thoughts making them believe that women talk more than men include “The tongues of women are like the tails of lamb, they are never still” and “The North sea will soon be requiring more water than a woman short words’ These proverbs set the pace for her argument she is clearly shows that the opposite is in fact true.

She features a Canadian research that attempted to find out who between men and women talk the most. In the study the researchers, Deborah and Janice reviewed sixty-three studies about the amount of talk men and women in America have in different contexts. Of the sixty-two women were found to talk more only in two studies (Holmes, 2008). Holmes also argues that men dominate conversations. She argues that in many conversations men are the ones who start the conversations and tend to control its direction.

They therefore, take the women as their subordinates in conversations and often talk more than the women. To argue the case for male dominance in conversations, Holmes (2008) argues uses a New Zealand study that suggest men take the dominative role in conversations. Franken, the researcher in the study compared the time men and women talked in T.V talk show. She established that men took more time than the women. This clearly supports her idea that the notion women talk too much is just a stereotype and not factual because in reality the opposite is true (Holmes, 2008).

Rafelman Rachel (1997) in her article “The Party Line” argues that case for men and women tend to talk about different things. She does not tend to take any side of the divide of who talks more than the other. Her arguments tend to suggest that men and women tend converse more than the other depending on the context. To show this she talks of parties where genders would split so that they can talk about what they like most. While the women discussed personal lives, the men were all about businesses as they drunk.

This clearly shows that men will talk more in business and political platforms than they will when it comes to personal matters. The use of the party makes her argument effective and clear to understand. Men also like to talk more about sports than women. Her argument is therefore, convincing that genders talk more when the context of the conversation surrounds their interest and likes (Rafelman, 1997). Rafelman (1997) tend to believe that in