In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated E-Prime, but I had no idea that it was actually called &quot;E-Prime&quot;. In addition to not using forms of &quot;to be,&quot; we followed the SEXI format. This meant that every body paragraph was composed of four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also had to be four sentences long.<p>The combination of E-Prime and SEXI was a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It was a tremendous help in writing my college senior thesis.<p>Unlike the article, I didn&#x27;t try to use either form in my comment. :)