The Ideas in Sandra Cisneross Only Daughter and Deborah Tannens Sex, Essay

The Ideas in Sandra Cisneross Only Daughter and Deborah Tannens Sex, Lies, and Conversation - Essay Example The purpose of gender plays different roles within Cisneros’s and Tannen’s pieces. Cisneros makes a big deal that she was the only daughter of a family of seven children. She desperately wanted to have her father be proud of what she did: writing. â€Å"I wanted my father to understand what it was I was scribbling, to introduce me as ‘My only daughter, the writer.’ Not as ‘This is only my daughter. She teaches.’ Es maestra— teacher. Not even profesora.† †¨ The structure of Cisneros’s story is short and to the point. The purpose of the essay is to show how Cisneros’s professional development progressed from being basically an unknown writer to, ten years later, having had a lot of success as a writer. The purpose of gender in Tannen’s essay is to show the difference in communication patterns between men and women. â€Å"The communication problems that endanger marriage can't be fixed by mechanical enginee ring. They require a new conceptual framework about the role of talk in human relationships.† Essentially, Tannen is saying we need to be able to rework the role of conversation between men and women. The structure of the essay begins by Tannen telling a story about how women talk less in public than in men. The purpose of the essay was to draw attention to why this mix-up in communications causes divorces. The explanation for the purpose of gender in these two essays is completely different betwixt the two—and the opposite sex (men) is mentioned in Cisneros’s piece but not nearly as much as in Tannen’s. The structure of the essays were different in that Cisneros’s piece was short and Tannen’s long. Both essays had a common purpose, however, which was to see the value in womens’ contributions. III. The Outcomes From the Two Stories ? The outcome from Sandra Cisneros’s story was her professional development. â€Å"Last year, aft er ten years of writing professionally, the financial rewards started to trickle in. My second National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. A guest professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. My book, which sold to a major New York publishing house.†3 The outcome for Tannen was talking about what bound women together: conversation. â€Å"For women, as for girls, intimacy is the fabric of relationships, and talk is the thread from which it is woven.†4 The explanation that draws a line in the sand between these two different pieces is that Sandra Cisneros is talking about how she, as a writer, overcame her struggles in order to become a writer and to ultimately make her father proud—which was the sole greatest achievement that Cisneros found?worthwhile to achieve. The main attraction of Tannen’s article is that she is talking about how gender differences severely impair relationships and lead to divorce. In terms of theme, the outcomes from these two storied essays are vastly different. In fact, Tannen’s assertion at the end of her piece that people who cannot work things out should just get divorced, makes all of her prior assertions about relationships seem invalid—because she is advocating divorce. This proves that she doesn’t really value the male-female relationship enough to want to preserve it—