A form of con­strained writ­ing, E-Prime strives to com­pletely restrict the use of the verb to be as a way to pre­vent impli­ca­tions of cer­tainty and objectivity.

As part of the This Col­umn Will Change Your Life series, Oliver Burke­man dis­cusses the mer­its of E-Prime and unam­bigu­ous lan­guage.

To think about and func­tion in the world, [Alfred Korzyb­ski] said, we rely on sys­tems of abstract con­cepts, most obvi­ously lan­guage. But those con­cepts don’t reflect the world in a straight­for­ward way; instead, they con­tain hid­den traps that dis­tort real­ity, caus­ing con­fu­sion and angst. And the verb “to be”, he argued, con­tains the most traps of all. […]

“Our judg­ments can only be prob­a­bilis­tic,” wrote Allen Walker Read, a Korzyb­ski fol­lower. “There­fore we would do well to avoid final­is­tic, abso­lutis­tic terms. Can we ever find ‘per­fec­tion’ or ‘cer­tainty’ or ‘truth’? No! Then let us stop using such words in our for­mu­la­tions.” E-Prime pro­vided an easy way to do this: sim­ply stop using “to be”.

All this might seem mani­a­cally point­less pedantry. But as cog­ni­tive ther­a­pists note, thoughts trig­ger emo­tions, and “final­is­tic, abso­lutis­tic” thoughts trig­ger stress­ful emo­tions. “I am a fail­ure” feels per­ma­nent, all-encompassing, hope­less. Restat­ing it in E-Prime – “I feel like a fail­ure” or “I have failed at this task” – makes it lim­ited, tem­po­rary, addressable.

via rtbc