Today I stumbled upon a website I first read in 2003, which reprinted an essay by Robert Anton Wilson, "Towards Understanding E Prime."
nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
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Then in 9th grade, I resolved to write English papers in E Prime for a semester. E′ omits the verb 'to be' and all its conjugations.
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Before Twitter's 140 chars, it presented a metagame that refines writing and thinking--a tonic like Strunk's Rule 17: "Omit needless words."
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In Japanese you can say "I am sad", but grammatically you must say "Aki seems sad". E′ tries to awaken this sensibility in English speakers.
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Looking at my scientific papers (with coauthors), my favorite abstract omits to be altogether, and another uses it only in the subjunctive.
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RAW's essay concludes "when a proposition resists all efforts to recast it [into] E-Prime, many consider it 'meaningless.'"
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#140characters purists need an external counter. In Vim, ':set cc=141'. You might add ':syn keyword Todo am are is was were be been being'.
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Replying to
for a long time I've been writing next to a 140-wide === line because, iirc, I had tried putting this exact option in a modeline and it didn't work. but now it works so thank you!