Captivates Deborah Tannen gradually raises awareness of others perception of marked women by deliberately beginning her writing with a personal narrative. Tannen chose to begin her story with a narrative, slowly building up her arguments through a variety of examples.
Her narrative first reels in the reader’s attention, similarly to how the she was drawn to the women at the conference. Tannen confidently comes out to implement her choice of the use of inductive writing structure here, as she comes out strong with a personal narrative. The examples serve to recreate the different looks (haircuts and style choices) each women portray, connecting to the different shifts in her other paragraphs, and finally even her big finish at the end is directly portrayed through the conference, as she ties the ending to the conference once again. This stylistic choice to set in place a frame in her narrative in the beginning is to get the audience’s’ mind active and drawn in. Once their minds are captivated, the author can finally incorporate examples to further develop her argument. The vivid and thorough imagery that provided the description for each individual woman satisfied the audience with an internal image of each woman, molded by their own blurred perceptions. Undoubtingly, this effectively forged a preconceived depiction of each female individual.
This compels the readers, presumably educated, women and men that reads the New York Times, to place themselves in Tannen’s position at the time, where she prejudged exclusively just the women, without a speck of curiosity for the men. Alongside with provocative & stimulating diction and strategically placed complementary comparisons, the author emphasizes and brings recognition to the harsh perception of women. As noted, each of the women’s hairstyles were staggeringly different, which was perceived as she just didn’t care or give effort about her looks. Instead of voicing that the absence of style for a woman’s hair is moderately standard or in relation to that of a man, Tannen narrates it as a circumstance of just not caring. Therefore, the implication is that the two genders are not dependent or reliant but rather completely independent.
One is marked and the other is not.
