I tried it out. I can’t recall which, but one of the hedgehog stories used E-Prime. I did it since I like constrained writing (like the questions thread), not in a quest for perfection and clarity. I found it a little helpful in the sense that using ‘to be’ can be like the passive voice. Between “It’s a little helpful” and “I found it a little helpful,” the latter helps a little. (I wrote this in E-Prime also, in the hopes that you would find that fact disturbing.) I also wrote something long without using the letter ‘O’ once for fun because of my general weirdness.
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To be or not to be… Is seems like such a useless disgusting word.
Learn E-prime folks.
Edit: I’m really slow and definitely scrolled a bit too fast when reading this thread.
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I’m reminded that the phrase “criminal conversation” was once used to mean adultery.
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Seriously? How do I express such sentences as “I was hungry”? “Was” transmits important information about time and is a word expressing being.
Would I say something like: “At a time in the past, hunger dominated my existence”?
“My sense of hunger nagged at my mind”?
“I felt hungry?” This isn’t the same as “I was hungry” because it only expresses a sensation. Whether or not I actually was in a state of hunger isn’t transmitted. Only that I felt that sensation.
I can see how it might help with literary writing, but if I’m just trying to communicate basic facts, the use of being verbs are very useful as a shorthand, and work well for the vast majority of readers. I shouldn’t have to think extra hard to formulate an expression of a commonly understood idea when the template already exists.
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You sly jokester, you.
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That expression certainly isn’t a problem in French, where one would say ‘J’ai eu faim’ (literally: I had hunger). The use of ‘is’ in expressing the equivalent in English seems to just be part of our linguistic culture (or something— I’m groping for words here).
To go a little further: many counselors and therapists actually encourage their clients to consciously make the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘feel’ when expressing their inner states— a cognitive-behavioral approach known as ‘neurolinguistic programming’ (so fancy!).
A basic example: instead of ‘I am sad’ (which counter-productively suggests that sadness is both an inherent and persistent trait of oneself), the client is encouraged to say ‘I feel sad’ (which not only dissolves these attributions, but also stages this feeling for discussion).
[Edit: I just now saw that NLP is mentioned in the E-prime article linked by @crenquis @nemomeno. My right hand to FSM, I did not see this before writing my post.]
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Puts on monocle, loads pipe with a spiced tobacco, and settles into the Comfy Chair.
I Am Sad, as opposed to I Feel Sad is perfectly cromulent. I certainly have been in the position of sadness without feeling sad, as I have also felt sad while not honestly posessing that attribute.
Is a ten dollar way of saying, “fake it till you make it”. Which I practice incessantly. I desperately hope the froods and hep cats here will notify me when " making it" has been achieved.
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Ridiculous. I appraise this phrase being worth at least a few hundred, given the median salary of those who use it most often.
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The link was from @nemomeno (I was quite late to the É party)
It’s not much of a constraint though, is it?
Real NLP is natural language processing; everything else is pseudo-science.
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I found E-Prime easy generally, but there are some cases of simple predication where I struggled. You add more “(subject) found/saw/noticed” constructs, and constructions can come off oddly, but it helps give fiction a more dynamic feel. I found writing with No-Os very hard, though.
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Ack! I’m so off today. Thank you, I’ll make the edit.
Honestly I have never heard or read about e-prime until today. I went through a small tutorial and simply listening to the phrases in my head, it becomes easy to understand why that pattern could be more effective in most circumstances.
But you can pull, ‘to be or not to be’, and ‘In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God’ from my ■■■■■, palid hands. (I am a total aetheist, but there are some good turns of phrase)
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…is a pseudoscientific scam, with no peer-reviewed evidence of efficacy, and is not accepted by scientific psychology or psychiatry.
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After doing some reading— yikes! I thought it was just a fancy phrase for communicating feelings, another small tool in the CBT workbench. But it sounds like its adherents champion it as a separate category of therapy entirely, with its own controversial model of interpersonal and interpersonal cognition.
Thanks for speaking up.
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Ha! Natural language processing is most certainly the prototypical pseudo-science!
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The two places E-Prime seems handy are in CBT type things - clarifying “I’m sad” vs. “I feel sad” seems to have some benefit, and in fiction where you want to verb things up and ‘to be’ doesn’t help. But at best E-Prime is a heuristic, not an absolute standard - slavishly applying it is pointless.
The sheisters who invented NLP borrowed a heap of crap they didn’t understand and imported/threw in various name-checks of more legit. principles to give their pseudoscientific cult/scam a veneer of legitimacy, so they borrowed E-Prime. The core of NLP seems to be encouraging magical thinking to solve all your problems, though. Tony Robbins and the rest of those scamming bastards deserve to die in a fire started by one of their scammy firewalks.
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You’re going to laugh at math in the face of “neuro linguistic programming”?
