The discipline of writing in E-prime splits, I think, into two parts.
The first part, less interesting perhaps, consists of avoiding one particular verb in all its forms. What determines whether a particular proposition requires that verb for its expression? To a great extent, historical happenstance. I can say ”...whether a particular proposition requires that verb” but not ”… whether that verb IS required to express a particular proposition”, for instance. Avoiding that verb resembles (not “IS like”) avoiding the letter “e”—a discipline that might equally reasonably go by the name (not “BE called”) E-prime: writers may find that it helps them write better, but largely because such restrictions trigger creative thinking and slow down one’s writing.
The second part, not mandated by E-prime as such, consists of avoiding predication: not affirming propositions of the form “P(x)” stating that a particular individual (or every one in some class) has a particular property. It happens that some such statements use the forbidden verb; but not all. If the inventor of E-prime thought he saw a good reason for finding the ones that use it worse than the ones that don’t, that reason is not known to me. I think this is the more important aspect of E-prime in its inventor’s view, but remain thoroughly unconvinced of its value myself. The main benefit of avoiding predication comes, I think, from having to qualify many statements by saying (for instance) who thinks/feels/experiences a particular thing; but why predication should need such qualification more than other statements puzzles me as much as why predication that uses the forbidden verb should need it more than predication that doesn’t.
So it seems to me that whatever benefits writing in E-prime may confer derive not from the central ostensible purpose of E-prime, namely avoiding predication, but from other aspects of it that arise almost by coincidence.
The discipline of writing in E-prime splits, I think, into two parts.
The first part, less interesting perhaps, consists of avoiding one particular verb in all its forms. What determines whether a particular proposition requires that verb for its expression? To a great extent, historical happenstance. I can say ”...whether a particular proposition requires that verb” but not ”… whether that verb IS required to express a particular proposition”, for instance. Avoiding that verb resembles (not “IS like”) avoiding the letter “e”—a discipline that might equally reasonably go by the name (not “BE called”) E-prime: writers may find that it helps them write better, but largely because such restrictions trigger creative thinking and slow down one’s writing.
The second part, not mandated by E-prime as such, consists of avoiding predication: not affirming propositions of the form “P(x)” stating that a particular individual (or every one in some class) has a particular property. It happens that some such statements use the forbidden verb; but not all. If the inventor of E-prime thought he saw a good reason for finding the ones that use it worse than the ones that don’t, that reason is not known to me. I think this is the more important aspect of E-prime in its inventor’s view, but remain thoroughly unconvinced of its value myself. The main benefit of avoiding predication comes, I think, from having to qualify many statements by saying (for instance) who thinks/feels/experiences a particular thing; but why predication should need such qualification more than other statements puzzles me as much as why predication that uses the forbidden verb should need it more than predication that doesn’t.
So it seems to me that whatever benefits writing in E-prime may confer derive not from the central ostensible purpose of E-prime, namely avoiding predication, but from other aspects of it that arise almost by coincidence.