Rating: 
Summary: Very enlightening
Review: Just finished reading this power book on communication and I loved it! It goes into the kinds of detail that women (and men) need to know so that success comes more naturally at work. The author's book is full of relevant facts and theories that are helpful.I also recommend a book that my company uses in its training programs -- it would be helpful to anyone who wants to integrate her or his skills together as a top performing leader. It's called ""The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills.""
Rating:
Summary: Good buy
Review: Just finished reading this power book on communication and I loved it! It goes into the kinds of detail that women (and men) need to know so that success comes more naturally at work. The author's book is full of relevant facts and theories that are helpful. I also recommend a book that my company uses in its training programs -- it would be helpful to anyone who wants to integrate her or his skills together as a top performing leader. It's called ""The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills.""
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent source for training staff who haven't a clue!
Review: One of my male employees was having problems in his interactions as a supervisor with female employees. I used this book as part of his corrective action to learn how to communicate effectively on the job, especially with female subordinates. D.Tannen was there long before John Gray hit the hype--teaching us how the sexes differ in the ways they communicate and that failure to understand this can get an employee in serious trouble,even ruin their career.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Discussion of the Cultural Differences of Language
Review: One of the most frequent criticisms I have heard of this work from my colleagues is, "So what do I do about it?", "How do I fix it?" Interesting enough to me, most of these comments were from men. Most of my female colleagues seemed more content to understand, appreciate and work within the differences. Deborah Tannen is careful not to show a preference for one style over another, and careful to respect both speaking modes. This approach can be very frustrating to anyone looking for a "How to" business book. This book is not about solutions any more than a book comparing the French and Spanish cultures is about solutions. It is about understanding linguistic/cultural differences. Those who understand will appreciate the "other's" language. Those who do not understand will keep on misunderstanding, wondering what is wrong and looking for a book that will tell them how to fix it. I regularly recommend this book to every business woman in one of my seminars. And, I recommend that they also buy copies for (a) their boss and (b) all of their subordinates . . . particularly if they are men.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: She raises so many issues and offers no way of dealing with them. A professor of linguistics should know that people want to know more than just the issues. She needed more research for the book esp. about how people deal with such issues effectively.
Rating:
Summary: A necessary read!
Review: TALKING FROM 9 TO 5: WOMEN AND MEN AT WORK by Deborah Tannen is a book that everyone should read if he or she goes to work, anywhere. If you are a boss or have a boss, you should read this book (thank you Mom & Dad). If you work with other people, you should read this book. Now that I have stressed that, I will tell you more about the book's focus and the points Tannen makes very well. She is well known for her book, YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND, which I have not read, but which is about how relationship problems come about due to differing communication styles between women and men ("Report" talk by men vs. "rapport" talk by women -- women talk "troubles talk" to build community, when men hear this, they are more than likely to feel that the problems need solving and will say what to do; this creates dissonance as the woman just wants to feel understood not "bossed" around, and the man can't understand why she's telling him problems if she doesn't want solutions). This book takes those issues to work and through many examples from her own research and others in sociolinguistics, anthropology and sociology, Tannen makes the point that different communication styles are problematic only when people don't understand them, that there is no "better" way to talk than another. Tannen made a fascinating point about communication styles and conversation rituals. She writes that people think they can tell when someone is lying to them, but research shows that really, people are not good at discerning this. In a similar way, we think we can tell if someone is confident and a good leader by the way they talk, but we can't. A woman, who raises the tone of her statements to sound like questions, who gives indirect orders and who seeks input before making decisions may often be assumed to be weaker than a man in a similar role, but her conversation rituals are not a true mark of who she is; they are the communication style that she was more likely than not socialized to use as a woman. Likewise, men are assumed to want the floor and command, when sometimes they would rather not take it. Tannen gives evidence on how difficult it is for women to be heard in meetings, and provides anthropological studies that show that as far back as age 3, boys listen to boys and girls listen to girls at play, but boys do not listen to girls, and may ignore and insult them when they pipe up to direct activities. This book is not a polemic against men or masculine styles. Tannen finds that most communication styles are appropriate in many instances. There is more than one way to get the job done, and sometimes, a masculine style is better than a feminine style, and sometimes the opposite is true, but she makes it very clear that a lack of that understanding can be detrimental to organizations because of erroneous assumptions made about people's abilities based on their conversational style. One of her overriding points, born out by her research, is that women tend to talk to build community and do nont like to stand out for accomplishments or for failures in a group. They will engage in ritual talk that seeks inclusion so as to maintain good feeling among the group, not because they are insecure and need to feel that no one dislikes them. Men, on the other hand, tend to engage in one-up talk, are more sensitive to being one down, and will take the lead to avoid being bested. (When a woman who is trying to build community is "one-upped" by a man who takes her ritualistic talk and her willingness to put herself down to create harmony, she feels "betrayed" by his spurning of her communal talk to take the upper hand. Who is "right?" Neither, but their reactions to the same conversation may be very different and in some cases, harmful to the organization.) This book really changed the way I think about organizational life, the assumptions that I draw, the way I have communicated with people who worked for me, and what I will strive to do in the future. Even if you don't read the whole thing, buy it and keep it around. The last chapter, "Who gets heard" is especially instructive, and the afterword is a great essay on the issue with justification for her methods and theories. I think this book would be perfect for anyone who reports to someone of the opposite gender or who is the boss of same. But because the standards for styles are not entirely gender based, I would, again, suggest this book to EVERYONE.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but does not reflect all realities
Review: The science of psycholinguistics is one of the hardest to write in, from what I see. For one, it's necessary to keep in mind that what may be the norm in a certain place for a certain time is not, de facto, what may apply to other places and periods. Also, the cultural influences on language happen to change fast, and the books that were relevant and up-to-date just a few years ago seem disappointingly irrelevant today.
Writing for a journal, where your research is given a proper time and place frame, is very different from writing popular versions made for the public at large. I recommend reading articles (Dr. Tannen has several that are excellent reads, among them _Gender in research on language - Researching gender-related patterns in classroom discourse_ Tesol Quarterly 30 (2): 341-344, from 1996) rather than books if you are truly interested in this topic.
As it is, and in spite of the good writing style, the book has far too many generalizations that do not apply to all places, nor do they apply to current times. I recommend "I Only Say This Because I Love You" instead, or even better, her articles.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking and helpful
Review: This book makes me acutely conscious of the way I communicate with other people, both women and men (as did "You Just Don't Understand" when I read it several years ago). Without mandating a certain method of communication or telling us how we must change our ways of talking to one another, Tannen illustrates and defines patterns and gives us enough information to work it out for ourselves. I definitely recommend this book to any woman in the workplace who wants to be seen as confident and competent without being labled as the B word.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking and helpful
Review: This book makes me acutely conscious of the way I communicate with other people, both women and men (as did "You Just Don't Understand" when I read it several years ago). Without mandating a certain method of communication or telling us how we must change our ways of talking to one another, Tannen illustrates and defines patterns and gives us enough information to work it out for ourselves. I definitely recommend this book to any woman in the workplace who wants to be seen as confident and competent without being labled as the B word.
Rating:
Summary: Don't look here for 'solutions'
Review: This is the first of Dr. Tannen's books I've read, so I don't know how it compares to the others (oh, fooey--there I go with a qualifying statement!!) but I kept finding myself thinking, 'so what do we DO about it?!' The book is extremely well written and noted, but it gets really depressing to page through countless examples of women's handicaps in business-speak without some relief. There are a few warnings about trying to alter one's style to 'fit in,' but no hints, no clues, no steps to take to extinguish, if not reverse, current behavior. This is not to say it isn't good reading, just not what I'd hoped to find.
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