Editing E-Prime (section)

==History==
D. David Bourland Jr., who had studied under [[Alfred Korzybski]], devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's [[general semantics]] in the late 1940s.<ref>[[Cullen Murphy]], "Just curious: essays", 1995, ISBN, 039570099X [https://archive.org/details/justcuriousessay00murp <!-- quote="David Bourland" prime. --> p. 78]</ref> Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay entitled "A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime" (originally published in ''General Semantics Bulletin''). The essay quickly generated controversy within the general semantics field,<ref>{{cite book | last1=Johnston | first1=P.D. | last2=Bourland | first2=D.D. | last3=Klein | first3=J. | title=More E-prime: To be Or Not II | publisher=International Society for General Semantics | year=1994 | isbn=978-0-918970-40-4 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uXOzfqfcW-0C&pg=PR12 | access-date=2021-02-07}}</ref> partly because practitioners of general semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb {{'}}''to be''{{'}} as such, and not just certain usages.

Bourland collected and published three volumes of essays in support of his innovation. The first (1991), co-edited by Paul Dennithorne Johnston, bore the title: ''To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology''.<ref>{{cite book|editor1-last= Bourland|editor1-first= D. David|editor2-last= Johnston|editor2-first= Paul Dennithorne |title=To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology |year=1991 |publisher=International Society for General Semantics |location=San Francisco |isbn=0-918970-38-5 |page=185}}</ref> For the second, ''More E-Prime: To Be or Not II'', published in 1994, he added a third editor, Jeremy Klein. Bourland and Johnston then edited a third book, ''E-Prime III: a third anthology'', published in 1997.