And the more times the word “you” is used, the more work the user has to do.

Not surprisingly, then, while “you” helps on social media by drawing attention, it hurts on customer support pages, where it can suggest the user is at fault or to blame.

Consequently, whether to use pronouns or not depends on how we want to assign credit or blame, and how subjective or objective we want what is being said to seem.

Said another way, present tense suggests that speakers don’t just have an opinion, they are relatively certain about it.

They responded to a difficult question with a related question of their own.

The key idea here— whether public or private, whether in line with what other people think you should do or not— is the combination of two words: “choosing” and “responsibilities.” My enduring great friend Tom Tierney puts it this way, “What are you doing that meets the ‘but for’ test? What are you getting done that would not otherwise happen ‘but for you’ even if almost no one ever knows about it?”