I understand that it can be an interesting mental exercise.  I&#x27;m just objecting to the underlying assumption that &quot;be&quot; makes sentences inherently unclear or subjective.  For exercise, you could instead have excluded, say, every five-letter word, but (hopefully) nobody will claim that five-letter words make English unclear.<p>It seems to me that E-prime works only because &quot;be&quot; is so common that you&#x27;re forced to rewrite almost every sentence, yet it carries so little &quot;semantic weight&quot; that all such sentences can be rewritten with a bit of practice.