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The point of E' is to provide a kind of mental exercise. By forcing yourself to write this way, you discover clearer ways to make your point, or to convey infor
by function_seven 11y ago
The point of E' is to provide a kind of mental exercise. By forcing yourself to write this way, you discover clearer ways to make your point, or to convey information.
Think of it like the weights baseball players put on their bats during practice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut)
- yongjik 11y agoI understand that it can be an interesting mental exercise. I'm just objecting to the underlying assumption that "be" makes sentences inherently unclear or subjective. For exercise, you could instead have excluded, say, every five-letter word, but (hopefully) nobody will claim that five-letter words make English unclear. It seems to me that E-prime works only because "be" is so common that you're forced to rewrite almost every sentence, yet it carries so little "semantic weight" that all such sentences can be rewritten with a bit of practice.