To be or not to be: An E-Prime Primer
To be or not to be by Amio Cajander CC-BY
In E-Prime we avoid all senses of the verb 'to be'. This includes the words 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. In doing so we aim to speak more precisely, avoiding lazy assertions of equivilence. It can prove difficult at first and many question the point of the exercise. However, it does bestow several benefits upon your writing when you adopt it.
It becomes harder to make dogmatic assertions.
When you rewrite such an assertion into E-Prime you either arrive at a more precise form of what you meant to say, or realise that you really wanted to say something else. For example, 'Bob is stupid' becomes 'Bob did something stupid' or 'Bob believes in a fallacy', or you realise you don't know that much about Bob's intelligence and just wanted to say he was stupid because you disagreed with something he said or did.
It helps avoid arguments
If you say 'Linux is the best operating system', you sound confrontational to Windows and Mac users. And perhaps even BSD users. The statement invites a confrontation by provoking feelings of attack. On the other hand, if you say 'I prefer the Linux operating system', or 'The linux operating system best suits my needs', then it will offend no-one. You speak your personal truth without the need to project it onto others. Thinking in E-Prime also helps you transcend such arguments when you see them happening, as arguments over which type of music or belief system 'is best' become seen as petty and meaningless. Many political arguments become pointless quarrels over the definitions of words.
You sound more scientific
Dogmatic assertion tends not to work very well in science. Using E-Prime doesn't guarantee scientific accuracy of course, but it does help you avoid making unscientific assertions. Instead of saving 'This experiment proves it is a particle', we say 'In this experiment it behaves like a particle.' The second statement could still contain an error, it may behave like a wave in that experiment, but the E-Prime sentence avoids the inaccurate assertion of proof made in the first statement.
You become less susceptible to propaganda and advertising
When people try to manipulate you into buying something or supporting a cause, they tend to use language heavilly laden with 'is', 'was', 'will be', 'are'. 'All X are stupid', 'Brand Y is what you need', 'C was a mistake, D will be better', 'Q is a P', 'F are dangerous and there will be a distaster if we don't stop them', 'H is the only way to stop F'. If you train yourself to be suspicious of all statements made using the verb 'to be', you quickly build an immunity (or at least a resistance) to this kind of manipulation.
Zen thinking?
One of the proponants of E-Prime that I admired, Robert Anton Wilson, claimed using E-Prime helps one achieve the state of mind that Zen Buddhism aimed to achieve. It seemed to work for him at least. :)
Here is a video of him discussing E-Prime...
Funny thing: you've just done what RAW himself took an entire book to do. Well done. :) BTW, particle is spelled, well, particle.
Thankyou, I consider that high praise! Plus, I always reward good proof reading, so much appreciation on spotting the typos. I have now corrected them.
It is :) RAW wrote to entertain most of the time, this is straight out condensed information. I appreciate that.
As you can see, I haven't quite converted my writing to E-Prime. :)
Don't worry, I don't all the time either. Look closely at the last sentence in the OP... ;)
I'm not sure if E-prime excludes that use of the word "is". You use "is" in this case to point at something, ala "Here's Johhny!" I suppose you could say "In the following video, RAW discusses E-Prime." But, meh. :)
When I write in E-Prime, I tend to avoid waffle as a positive side-effect. That tends to produce condensed information. Another reason I like it. I hope it doesn't get too dry...
Consider a challenge? :)
What kind of challenge?
First one to use a form of "to be" in a blog post loses. One week.
I see. Presumably we exclude quotations. However the easy way to win would mean posting no blog posts for a week. Or very short ones. So we should count the number of words used before the form of 'to be' appears. Rather than time of post... ;)
This is the best info I've ever seen on E-Prime, and that includes what Bob had to say about it himself. I'm going to bookmark it to give to people who want to know more about it.
I didn't realize until now that I actually do this a lot of the time. It isn't so much that I avoid 'to be,' it's just that I try not to talk about things with certainty unless I'm actually certain of them. Fortunately, the list of things I'm certain about is very small, so there's not a lot of sorting involved. ;-) I'm sure I screw this up a lot of the time and don't even catch myself.
E-Prime certainly helps you say things without unwarrented certainty, and without sounding weak and without having to add caveats and conditions. I find I can express lack of certainty in a possitive way rather than as a sequence of negatives. Of course, some people find it hard to function without black and white thinking and find E-Prime statements non-commital, but they would also find any expression of uncertainty difficult, especially when phrased as negatives.