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RE: To be or not to be: An E-Prime Primer
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.