I have borrowed the title of Deborah Tannen’s book on communication between men and women because my 66 college students recently wrote narratives about people who, literally or figuratively, speak a different language.

Daily we are misunderstood, in trivial and important ways. Narrating an account of one such interaction shouldn’t be hard, but I knew my students would find the analysis of its significance challenging. But they always surprise me with their inventiveness, and these papers tackled the subject in more subtle ways than I expected.