Avoiding accusatory “you”s helps avoid placing unintended blame.

Personal pronouns take ownership. So whether we should use them or not depends on how much responsibility we want for whatever we’re talking about.

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.

But what we forget is that while it’s easy for us to parse, others may not feel the same way. While we have spent lots of time thinking about something, or know a lot about it, we often fail to account for the fact that others may not be in the same position.