Tannen and Graff

After reading Tannen's essay I thought about how we use war language more often in language than we believe we do. I also agreed with her when she said that it's more difficult to have a debate or argue with others. Once you get defensive the conversations usually moves focus from the actual topic to bashing the credibility of the person you are arguing with. While reading Graff I felt like he was a little hypocritical in his writing. He said that we skew our arguments and writings by only using the examples that will prove our point. He did just that when you brought up Tannen in his paper. He only used what Tannen wrote when it was convenient to the point that he was trying to make. However, I did think that his paper was more fully rounded about arguments than Tannen's was. He spoke about how arguing has its good points and that if we learned how to argue better that we would have more educational debates that said on focus instead of going straight to the person. I didn't understand why it was relevant to bring up teachers never arguing in front of students or students never having debates in class. In my government class we had two debates and they were the most stupid debates I've experienced. No one knew what he or she were saying, but they kept getting louder and more personal as a way to try to get the other person to back down. So as I've said before I do agree with Graff about teaching students how to argue, but we don't need to see our teachers arguing to do that. I really liked when Tannen brought up how people imagined the crash being worse when they were told the cars smashed into each other than the others that were just told that the cars bumped into each other. That shows us just how powerful language can be. This goes directly to what Graff was trying to say, we need to learn how to better control our arguments, because they will have an affect on other people and sometimes we won’t know how they’re going to affect others until it’s too late. We don’t want our politicians using their debate skills to manipulate us to vote for them if they really won’t have our best interests in heart. Those that don’t take the time to learn won’t be able to see the gaps in logic of the debates.