Hi Everyone!

It's Saturday at 9pm and I'm finally getting round to posting something on my blog. I enjoyed going through your blog sites and wish to encourage you to try and be a little more active on this project (though I could certainly be called a hypocrite for my lack of activity). It can really help your writing fluency and, as I read through your comments, I can really see how it can be a useful tool for you to talk about the topics we are doing in class, ask questions, give opinions, etc.

A lot of you have raised a few questions about the topic of Pragmatics and Gender, so I thought I'd respond to a few of the ideas.

Some of you didn't like the dialogues. I can understand this, it is a rather unique aspect of this field of academia. I can't think of any other that forces you to analyse language in 'real time' like this; it's just the nature of the beast. I've always thought it funny that these academics spend their lives going around taping conversations at dinner parties, in offices, in meetings, etc. If they weren't University professors, they would be arrested!

But I would like to defend the dialogues in one way that many of you haven't thought about (or at least it hasn't come out on your blogs). Again, because of the nature of the research questions, you have to look at these dialogues and ask yourselves whether the patterns so observed are, to any extent, generally true of men and women. As I said you can't say that all ...

An interesting question was brought up about there being no studies in which men and women interacting together. It's true that the video, part of my lecture, and the reading are about unisex studies. However, in my lecture I did talk about some mixed-gender situations. They were the TV Debates and the Workplace ideas. But there certainly is an awful lot of research to be done in this field, so if any of you want to do a PhD in linguistics and take on the field ...

Many have expressed objection to some of the ideas about the generalisability of the observed communication patterns. Please keep in mind that they aren't my opinions, I was just presenting others'! This is certainly valid. Individual differences are another variable that is not figured into the work I presented. And, to my knowledge, there hasn't been any research into it. So again if you wish to do a PhD and ...

I usually try to avoid giving my personal opinions about issues in the class (that's so male of me) but with this one I will say that I believe sometimes these patterns do lead to miscommunication and both parties in the interaction don't realise that it is just this different style at work. Ohh - I should have included that in my conclusion!

Okay, I'm being very male also in that, as you saw in the video, I'm writing too much for a simple blog entry! I welcome any comments.

Scott