Archive for May, 2006

How to Write Quotations in English Prime

May 17, 2006 at 2:55 pm · Filed under Quotes for Thought

Take one English-Standard quotation:

"Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life." — James F. Byrnes

Convert it into English-Prime:

  1. Identify any 'to be' verbs. In this case: 'is', also known in maths as '='.
  2. Realise the speaker's inherent dogmatism or absolutism, intentioned or not.
  3. Undelete the 'point of view' of the speaker with a line such as, "according to <speaker>" to reference their opinion as relative.
  4. Use a phrase to replace 'to be' with an active verb such as 'appears', 'seems', 'shows charateristics of' etc.

End result:

Friendship without self-interest, according to James F. Byrnes, appears to resemble one of the rare and beautiful things of life.

A relatively non-dogmatic statement i.e. one which encourages free thought and open-debate which you can use in your essays, articles, reports, dissertations etc.

♦

Let's say we had to research and write about a topic like friendship. The following excerpt I have written used E-Prime rules to show how I can have the opinions of another relatively integrated with my own:

Friends, in Emily Dickinson's perception, portray as her "estate". I agree to the extent that your friends can resemble valued possessions except you don't actually own them no more then they might own you.

Where Aristotle onced alleged that without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all the other goods I would agree in relation to Seal who once sang and inferred that loneliness resembles the social "killer" which corresponds with "high extroversion" in my view.

In essence, each 'point of view' presents relative to the other and as a whole we could, by popular vote, call these collections of opinions a doctrine. This would apply in general to incorporating different philosophies, systems, theories, opinions etc. into a new singular field hence the cliché that nothing seems truly original (at least in E-Prime rules).

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