“Warriorship is a Basic Sense of Unshakeability.
It’s a sense of Immovability and Self-Existing Dignity rather than that you are trying to fight with Something Else.”
While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counselled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual.
For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about ..."
Korzybski observed improvement "of one full letter grade" by "students who did not generalize by using that infinitive".
Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-Prime when discussing psychological distress to encourage framing these experiences as temporary (see also Solution focused brief therapy) and to encourage a sense of agency by specifying the subject of statements.
According to Ellis, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime".
However, Ellis did not always use E-Prime because he believed it interferes with readability.
Examples
Standard English
Blessed are The Poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
— New American Standard Bible, Matthew 5:3
E-Prime
The Poor in Spirit receive blessings, for The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them.
