[hugh3]

There's some interesting gems in here:

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.

[JamesBlair]

Especially when you connect it back to the discussion of gender on the first page:

Most people assume that men use I-words and cognitive words more than women and that women use we-words, emotions, and social words more than men. Bad news. You were right if you guessed that women use social words more. However, women use I-words and cognitive words at far higher rates than men. There are no reliable differences between men and women for use of we-words or emotion words (OK, those were trick questions). And men use articles more than women, when you might guess there’d be no difference.

[dill_day]

Interesting, but I think there are some good comments (at the article) too -- pointing out that it also just seems to make sense -- like,

Undergraduates write to professors with singular first person pronouns because they are often requesting information, or this sort of thing... understandable then that there's less reason for I, me, and my in the professor's response (and easy to imagine similar situation in other relationships).

Still, a cool article. Interesting research.

[TeMPOraL]

Also, (at least where I'm from) there's an expectation that as an undergraduate, you'll address professors using proper tone. This way, you end up writing lots of "I'd like to ask (...)", ", "is it possible for me to", etc. The writing gets full of fixed-phrases with lots of "I" and "me" - the author's "I-word salad". And academics I know tend to reply directly, without any formally required style of writing, so their communcation is more natural.

[wisty]

Also, the student is trying to get the professor to understand things from their perspective. "I am having trouble with ...", "I don't understand why ...". They want the professor to sympathise with their position.

The professor is giving instructions - "you should check the course website ...". They don't care if the students understands their position. They could try to justify "I can't help you with this, because if I did I would have to make exceptions for everyone"; but they don't need to.