Guanning Zeng (Ning)
Mr. Smith
ENGL 96
09/22/14
Most Helpful For Newly Married Couples
Men and women are very different. Especially they talk in different ways. They have different types of talking style, different ways of thinking, and different point of views. For instance, when men and women go shopping, men always know what they want and when they get into the shopping mall, they only go to the shop that can get their target. That is way totally different to women. When girls hand out at shopping mall, they do not usually have targets. They just walking around the shopping mall and buy things they like. In the article “His Talk, Her Talk,” Joyce Maynard stated the difference between men’s topic and women’s topic. She anointed men tends to not be interested in what women wants to talk about. In another article “Man to Man, Woman to Woman,” Mark A. Sherman and Adelaide Haas stated how men talk more directly and women think, and watch what they say. Through both of these can see the issue with conversation is a common circumstance within relationships which is often overlooked. Base on the situation, I believe “Man to Man, Woman to Woman” is a better choice to help new married couple. It is more easily to see how couples can get alone with each other, it tells couple what kind of topics your partners will interested in, and it also give suggestion to couple for how can they communicate with each other in a better way.
First of all, even though both articles address the same issue, they explain the problem with different support points. In my perspective, I think Sherman and Haas’s article “Man to Man, Woman to Woman” has stronger opinions to tell couples how to get alone with each other than Maynard’s. According to “His Talk, Her Talk” by Joyce Maynard, she believes that men are not smarter, steadier, more high-minded than women. She tells her own experience to proof there is such a thing as “men’s talk” or “women’s talk”. One night, when she attended to a party, “it suddenly became apparent that all the women were in one room and all the men were in the other (31).” Moreover, she points out that she is on different channel with her husband, “When he got home, I asked what they talked about…., I would say we talked about life, love, happiness and heartbreak (31).” She talks about what is the problem and how does it happened, but she never tells us how to solve it. So, her support points are not strong enough to describe difference of male- female. On the other hand, Sherman and Haas have stronger points to tell. They also talks about the problems of men and women communications, but they talk from a more clinical perspective than a personal experience. They use sexes to cut into the topic, and then they discuss the different in style and function of conversation between male and female. The authors send out questioners to get answers and they discussed how the topics of conversations showed to be a key, they also discuss how women’s topics tended to be more emotional and to the self than men’s. At the same time, the authors showed how men and women feel more comfortable when they having conversation with the same sexes than the opposite sex because same sexes felt more understood.
Secondly, both articles express there are so many problems between male and females’ conversation. In “His Talk, Her Talk,” Joyce Maynard stated men and women have hard time to communicate, they have different style and them misunderstanding it. She mentions “when Steve tells a story…reduce the whole conversation for me to a one- sentence summary (32).” She points out the problem, but she doesn’t points out the solution. Sherman and Haas’s article “Man to Man, Woman to Woman” has different idea. As the article said, “First, they may not much to talk about, and second, when they talk, misunderstanding often develops that lead to major fights (32).” Men and women have different talking style, and most of time, they disagree with each other’s idea.
