Although communication events are commonly thought of as planned with an agenda, some events, even those repeated on a regular basis, take place spontaneously. Last weekend I went with my family to our summer home on the lake in a wooded area. The community there has only about 150 locals who stay year round, but in the summer about 1500 summer residents. The night after we arrived, we went to a little country bar that was built in the 1940s from a Sears-Roebuck kit, set in the woods on a small lake. The event I witnessed turned out to have a strong gender component to it, and so I chose to analyze the event in terms of gender communication styles.

             Whereas sex is a biological term that denotes male or female in terms of their reproductive organs, gender is learned through socialization. Genderization begins in infancy when adults say baby boys are handsome and tough while they call baby girls angelic and beautiful. Unlike their reproductive organs, gender is not something we have. We learn to construct it, enact or perform it by choosing to wear clothing associated with masculinity or femininity, for example, adopting a certain communication style, and pursuing interests and goals that society has deemed appropriate to our specific gender. By the time boys and girls start school the socialization process is well underway and children are actively constructing gender. .

             A communication style reveals how a person sees him or herself interacting with others. Surprisingly, communication styles have been of interest to scholars for a long time. In Aristotle's day, style was one of the five canons of rhetoric (Kirtley & Weaver, 1999). Aristotle wrote rules and suggestions for communication style that are still in use today. Many researchers have argued that language is not gender-neutral. The way it is used often seems to divide, separate, and differentiate men from women (Kirtley & Weaver, 1999).