Not Ready For Prime Time: E-Prime
Or maybe it is, and it’s me who’s not ready for prime time. In any case, I’ve been struggling a bit with the concept of E-Prime ever since a colleague on one of my subscription lists called my attention to it.
E-Prime is English for people who want to be extraordinarily clear in terms of meaning, and really don’t care what the content sounds like (or, possibly more importantly, reads like).
From the Wikipedia article, always a good place to start (but never to end) research:
By eliminating most uses of the passive voice, E-Prime encourages writers and speakers to make explicit the agent of a statement, possibly making the written text easier to read and understand.
E-Prime is used as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the sentence “the movie was good”, translated into E-Prime, could become “I liked the movie”. The translation communicates the speaker’s subjective experience of the movie rather than the speaker’s judgment of the movie. In this example, using E-Prime makes it harder for the writer or reader to confuse a statement of opinion with a statement of fact.
Frankly, some of it sounds like a fad diet. There are “allowed” words and words that are “not allowed.” One may never, ever, ever use the high-fat verb “to be.” Presumably one should also experience the same guilt when slipping back into saying the forbidden “is” word that one does when snagging that piece of forbidden chocolate cake.
Robert Anton Wilson in Toward Uniderstanding E-Prime notes:
Korzybski felt that all humans should receive training in general semantics from grade school on, as “semantic hygiene” against the most prevalent forms of logical error, emotional distortion, and “demonological thinking.” E-Prime provides a straightforward training technique for acquiring such semantic hygiene.
Indeed, those interested in semantics have long been discussing the problem of the verb “to be,” inviting along the way some wordplay (To Be In Their Bonnets) and inspiring a new way of editing (E-Prime As A Revision Strategy).
I’m already hearing the voices of some of my writing students and clients, who have experienced (ad infinitum, ad nauseaum) my calls to tighten their writing. “Isn’t this what you’re talking about?”
Well, no.
There’s a difference between tightened, good writing and writing that removes the ability to make it sing. Or, as one of my correspondents would have it, “If is was good enough for the Bard, it’s good enough for me.” Ambiguity is often the very stuff of great literature, and that requires access to all of our vocabulary and myriad ways of using it.
Perhaps here, as elsewhere in life, context is everything. I don’t want flowery writing in the manual that accompanied my new DVD player (where, due perhaps to the writer’s lack of command of any English—E-Prime or otherwise—the directions are far from clear); but I just finished reading the superb novel Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott, and was overwhelmed not only by her ability to tell a wondrous story, but by the language with which she told it. And I like that feeling. I want it again, the next time I open a book and take the time to revel in the sheer sensuality of words.
Perhaps the best last word on E-Prime is by the witty and wonderful Elisha Webster Emerson, who gives a lively history of the E-Prime movement and her own take on it in A Review in E-Prime. While you’re there, stay for a few minutes and read other articles on the blog: they are truly well worth your attention. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, Grammar, Language, Words on April 2nd, 2009