Tannen Vs Graff by Kennedy Tran

When I first read the story from Tannen, my first impression was that I did notice that there were a lot of English idioms that dealt with war in some sense. I agreed as I read about how debates nowadays are just about finding the weak points in your opponent, and attacking it. (Ironically, it’s also a war metaphor.) As I continued on, it came to me that it seemed Tannen was becoming a hypocrite. She talks about arguments and its legitimacy, yet here it seems she’s the one who’s about to have the argument over legitimacy. She talks about turning arguments into debates, but then talks about getting rid of arguments as a whole (which in my opinion would be a ludicrous idea.) I liked an example that Tannen used, though. The example was when she talked about how you get the message across to someone who is smoking in a non-smoking area. It’s never occurred to me more than now that your tone of voice, the way you connote and choose your words could affect how a person responds to you. (One thing that Tannen does not imply though is the matter of the situation from the smoker’s perspective. Perhaps the smoker knows he is doing something illegal?) If it was one thing I got out of reading Tannen’s story, it was that not arguing is the inevitable.

When I first read Graff’s story, I quickly realized how he was picking against and attacking Tannen’s essay. Though there were points where Graff agreed with, he mostly criticized her essay. I would certainly agree with Graff’s perspective of argument versus debate. He picked up on a lot of things I saw against Tannen. One thing was Tannen’s hypocrisy, “In deploring the attack mode, she can’t help succumbing to it herself.” In the end, Graff talks about how not arguing is improbable, but with luck, “getting the argument game out in the open and acknowledging its unavoidability will help us start playing the game a bit less egotistically and competitively, and with more respect for each other.” I would completely agree with this statement, as to what Tannen was stating in her essay about how arguments nowadays are just attacking each other’s facts. Hopefully, when a person learns to listen (a lesson Graff was pointing out), then can a person finally master the art of arguing. In the end, I really enjoyed Graff’s essay better. It appealed to me more and made more sense to me than Tannen’s did.