Deborah Tannen wants to play overprotective mother to us all.

"This is not another book about civility," Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture. "Civility," she explains, suggests a "veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast." Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.

In her previous books--That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click.) But in The Argument Culture, she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because "contentious public discourse" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.

Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book:

Don't just quarrel; listen and learn.

Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own.

Don't argue for the sake of arguing.

Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes.

Many issues are multisided.

Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws.

Don't fight over small issues.