Reading the officer's tone isn't about mind-reading — it's in the language

RFEs vary a lot in how they're written even when the underlying objections are similar. Some are close to a checklist — "submit X, submit Y" — and some read adversarial, pushing back on specific claims already made in the petition. That difference is real and worth noticing, because it changes how much explanation your response needs versus how much new evidence it needs. A mechanically-worded RFE is usually satisfied by directly supplying what's asked for. A more skeptical, probing RFE — one that specifically questions the independence of a letter, or challenges whether coverage is really about your work — usually needs the response to address the officer's actual concern head-on, not just add more of the same kind of evidence that triggered the skepticism in the first place. This isn't about guessing what an officer is "really" thinking. It's about reading what's actually written closely enough to tell a documentation gap from a credibility challenge — they call for different responses.