Friday 23 February 2007

How To Stop All or Nothing Thinking - Speak in E-Prime

Hi there,

Many people find all or nothing thinking - also known as binary thinking - a common issue when dealing with cognitive distortions.

I have noted that many people find that speaking in E-Prime may reduce the tendency to label situations and people into certain categories.

From Wikipedia:

E- Prime attempts to remove the verb “to be” in all its forms from English: be, is, am, are, was, were, been and being, plus all the contractions. This has the tactical effect of eliminating the passive voice. According to proponents, it forces the writer (or speaker) to think differently, and often results in language that most people find easier to read. Some call E-Prime a variant of the English language, while others approach it like a mental discipline to filter their own speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the grammatical construct changes “The movie was good.” to “I liked the movie.” Telling someone “the movie was good” imparts the state of goodness to the movie, rather than communicating the subjective nature of one's experience of the movie.


E-Prime forces a writer to choose verbs and meanings carefully: the elimination of "to be" implicitly eliminates the passive voice and progressive aspect. Some defective verbs, such as "can", use paraphrases involving "to be" in some tenses and moods. This constraint alone accounts for much of the appeal of E-Prime to some of its advocates, since many stylists argue that such constructions occur too frequently in sloppy English writing. Of course it may also generate difficulties for some writers as they learn to use E-Prime.


An example of how E-Prime might work.

So the short poem:

Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

One possible translation in E-prime:

Roses appear red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
And you please me too.

To use this tip, simply eliminate all uses of the verb "to be" from your communication for a given period of time, whether an hour, a day, or the time it takes you to write an email that you fear will turn into a flame.

I have indeed found this technique useful when I wish to speak in a diplomatic tone such as in a meeting

In my experience - I have found this technique useful to illustrate how people possibly label situations by using words such as:

be
being
been
am
is; isn't
are; aren't
was; wasn't
were; weren't

An example:

"That is a spaceship!"

In E-prime:
"That certainly looks like a spaceship to me." (Implication: it merits further investigation. What does it look like to you?)

You could go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime as a place to learn more about E-Prime.

Good Luck,

Allen

P.S. I wrote this article entirely in E-Prime, except for the examples.

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