E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted E′) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of to be—be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being— the archaic forms of to be (e.g. art, wast, wert), or the contractions of to be—'s, 'm, 're (e.g. I'm, he's, she's, they're).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence "the film was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the film" or as "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.
Read more about E-Prime: History, Different Functions of "to Be", Rationale, Discouraged Forms and Rationale For Typical Replacements, Influence of E-prime in Psychotherapy, Examples, Works Written in E-Prime, Criticisms
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... Many authors have questioned E-Prime's effectiveness at improving readability and reducing prejudice (Lakoff, 1992 Cullen, 1992 Parkinson, 1992 Kenyon, 1992 ... at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of general semantics) as follows The elimination of a whole class of sentences results in ... and by the use of quotation marks - without using E-Prime ...