E-Prime

I first learned about E-Prime a few months ago, in a wonderful blog post by Sandra Snan, and instantly became enamoured with the concept!

D. David Bourland Jr wrote up the first paper on E-Prime back in 1965, titled “A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime” ¹. He says he can’t take credit for inventing the concept, but forgot who he first heard about it from. He defines it as follows:

If we represent the whole of the English language as E, and the linguistic element “to be” with all its inflectional forms by e, then this paper concerns the language E’, defined as: E’ = E - e.

In other words: The English language without the verb to be.

A few (somewhat contrived) examples:

1. “E-Prime is interesting” -> “E-Prime interests me”
2. “Learning banjo is so hard” -> “I keep ending my banjo practice early, because the strings cut into my fingers”
3. “Honesty is good” -> “Honesty helps people build trust and mutual understanding”
4. “X is what we need to do” -> “Doing X might do Y”

Now, you can almost always 1:1 translate an English statement into E-Prime by adding a generic verb like “to find” and some hypothetical person, e.g. “People find learning banjo difficult”, but that defeats some of the intent behind the language, which we’ll talk about below.

The translations above add more information than the original statement, which E-Prime doesn’t require, but they highlight a benefit of thinking this way. Without “is”, you have to show some evidence for what you believe.

I’ve only just now read Bourland’s original essay, in preparation for this blog post. Unfortunately, I didn’t like it. The essay as a whole, and the Koryzbski excerpt ² in particular, came across as condescending and preachy. The two of them (especially Koryzbski) appeal to the authority of science and formal logic to try to couch their beliefs as objective fact, calling those who don’t conform “delusional” and “primitive”.

In general, I think that anytime one finds themself talking about “primitive psychology”, they’ve probably gone wrong somewhere, and should sit down and have a think about their life.

Anywhoodles, gross paternalism aside, the actual concept of E-Prime still fascinates me!

Speaking as somebody who often leans on exaggeration and categorical statements (“this is the worst thing ever!”) in his speech, E-Prime has helped me to think in nuance, instead of in black and white. And now that, in the US, political speech and conversation in general has gotten ever more dogmatic and divided, I think it’d help us all to exercise nuance.

I highly recommend you read the blog post I mentioned up at the beginning. Sandra has had a lot of experience writing in E-Prime and offers some great advice about it, notably:

“Thinking in English and then translating those thoughts to E-Prime undermines the entire thing. I’ve seen things like “The Bible translated to E-Prime”. That’s wack. Don’t do that. You learn it in the wrong way if you do that.”

Lo and behold, when reading her post I immediately thought: “I know, I’ll make a plugin that will highight any ‘to be’s’ in my writing, that’ll help me write E-Prime!” Bad! As she says, it completely defeats the point. I want to learn to think in E-Prime, not just translate into it after the fact. I still struggle with it, but the advice to not translate has helped me.

When I translate into E-Prime, my writing gets really clunky compared to my normal English. I lean on phrases like “I find” and “I think” far too much. It takes me longer, but when I try to come up with a sentence in E-Prime first, it comes out more natural sounding.

You may have noticed – I wrote this very blog post in E-Prime! It has taken me so much longer than a normal post. I’ve had to keep rewriting sentences where I used “to be” without thinking about it. “Has been” and “have been” bedevil me. I do expect that it’ll get easier over time though!

Unlike Bourland, I don’t think that E-Prime represents the natural evolution of the English language or anything like that. But I do think it has its benefits over normal English.

I really like that E-Prime forces the speaker to state the people involved in any statement. Bourland calls this “return of the role-players”. For example, instead of saying “the cat is friendly” you have to say something like “the cat keeps wanting me to pet it”. You can’t just declare a universal truth, you have to back it up with something that actually happened and position yourself (and the cat) in it.

It knocks you off your soap box. Very few people speak in mathematical absolutes (2 + 2 is 4) – and for everything but mathematical equality your perspective makes your words subjective. You can’t say “X is true” only that you think that you saw X do Y.

Of course, this comes with a downside: it gets real hard to talk abstractly. Trying to define an abstract concept (like E-Prime) without the word “is” will drive a person mad. I rewrote the above paragraph like three times. But, for normal every day speech, how often do you really need to talk abstractly? Still, definitely a tradeoff.

Additionally, I do think that some English constructs become unnecessarily hard to say in E-Prime, most especially the present continuous tense, e.g. “I am running”. You can’t say that, you have to say “you can see me running”? Or something? I don’t think that allowing that tense would go against the intent of E-Prime – but it does add a complicated exception to the simple rule of “don’t use to be”.

Anyway, in general, I do like it. In fact, since I’ve learned about it, I’ve noticed that a lot of writing I like generally conforms to it. Not 100% of the time of course, but more often than not. Keep an eye out yourself, see if that holds true for you!

I don’t think I’ll write in E-Prime all (or even most) of the time, but learning about it has definitely changed the way I think about my language. My girlfriend and I once tried to go a whole day speaking only E-Prime. We gave up somewhere around lunchtime – but we had a fun and silly morning!

I’d love to hear about any other experiments like E-Prime, in English or any other language, if you know of them. Thanks for reading!