So, writing without "is" restricts what you can say, and it happens that some of the things you can't say in E-prime are (potentially, sometimes) harmful. Simi

So, writing without "is" restricts what you can say, and it happens that some of the things you can't say in E-prime are (potentially, sometimes) harmful. Similarly, if you never eat anything, you won't get fat. I'm unconvinced by some of the ways in which you claim my E-prime translations of opinion statements are improvements. For instance, "is overrated" --> "blah blah more highly blah blah": I don't think the E-prime version is any more explicit about what the open questions are; it's just more verbose. As I said elsewhere in this thread: in so far as writing in E-prime helps to clarify your thoughts, it's not specifically avoiding copulas that does it, it's writing under a severe restriction so that you keep having to rethink what you're saying and what it really means. Anything that repeatedly forces you to stop writing automatically and find a new way of expressing yourself will do that. (Therefore: I conjecture that experienced E-prime writers and speakers, if any there be, get less benefit from using E-prime than those of us who have to do it laboriously from first principles.) Writing in Shakespearean sonnets, or without the letter "e", would do about as well. And, at least in the latter case as in E-prime, it would do harm as well as good, both because it would slow you down and because some things might just turn out to be too difficult to say in the restricted language despite being worth saying.