No two people have the same
style of communicating but people use their communicative
styles to show what groups they identify with. That
means that men will often talk 'like men' and women will often
talk 'like women.' Technically that means that two women
talking to each other will use shorter pauses between turns
than two men talking to each other. And when men and
women talk there is a tendency for them to exaggerate the
differences; women tend to speed up and men tend to slow
down. Those are tendencies, not hard and fast rules.
There are also differences
between younger and older people, people who belong to
difference ethnic groups, occupational groups, regions of the
country and so forth. Even personality works into
this. Type-A's tend to use shorter pauses than other
personality types.
This means two things:
you are better understood talking to someone very like you
than someone very different from youself. It also means
that when you are talking to someone very different from
yourself you need to watch carefully for the subtle effects of
differences in communicative style.
