I have trouble imagining how to answer &quot;What&#x27;s E-Prime; I&#x27;ve never heard of it.&quot; without using the semantics of &quot;to be&quot;. And answering that seems to me the primary goal of an encyclopedic article.<p>If the article starts with &quot;E-Prime prescribes...&quot; I still don&#x27;t know what E-Prime _is_. Is it a committee? Is it a style guide? (Right now the article says it&#x27;s a version of English, which, if superficially, at least answers the question).