Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

and You Just Don't Understand, the latter of which spent four years on the New York Times Best Sellers list, including eight consecutive months at number one.

She demonstrates that everyday conversation is made up of linguistic features that are traditionally regarded as literary, such as repetition, dialogue, and imagery.

[7] In particular, Tannen has done extensive gender-linked research and writing that focused on miscommunications between men and women, which later developed into what is now known as the genderlect theory of communication.

She has also compiled and analyzed information from other researchers in order to draw out notable trends in various types of conversations, sometimes borrowing and expanding on their terminology to emphasize new points of interest.

[5] As one example of gender-linked misinterpretations, Tannen points out that a man who is on the receiving end of "troubles talk" from his wife will often take the mention of a problem and how it was handled as an invitation to pass judgment, despite the fact that "troubles talk" is simply an expository experience meant to enhance emotional connections.

[5] She coined the term "connection maneuvers" to describe interactions that take place in the closeness dimension of the traditional model of power and connection; this term is meant to contrast with the "control maneuvers", which, according to psychologists Millar, Rogers, and Bavelas, take place in the power dimension of the same model.

Tannen challenged the conventional view of power (hierarchy) and connection (solidarity) as "unidimensional and mutually exclusive" and offered her own kind of model for mapping the interplay of these two aspects of communication, which takes the form of a two-dimensional grid (Figure 1).

Tannen also highlights ventriloquizing – which she explains as a "phenomenon by which a person speaks not only for another but also as another"[10] – as a strategy for integrating connection maneuvers into other types of interactions.

[9] Upon analyzing the recording, Tannen came to the conclusion that the speech of the New Yorkers was characterized by exaggerated intonations (paralinguistics), overlapping speech between two or more speakers, short silences, and machine-gun questions, which she defines as questions that are "uttered quickly, timed to overlap or latch onto another's talk, and characterized by reduced syntactic form".

These percentages, combined with other elements of the study, suggest that the degree of indirectness a listener generally expects may be affected through sociocultural norms.

Tannen provides an overview to how culture and power may subconsciously influence a speaker's preference for indirectness in her 1994 New York Times Magazine article "How to Give Orders Like a Man.

[13] According to her, agonism limits the depth of arguments and learning, since authors who follow the convention pass up opportunities to acknowledge strengths in the texts they are arguing against; in addition, this places the newest, attention-grabbing works in prime positions to be torn apart.