Thank you Stephen Michael Hawley, for remembering SF, '92. You asked whether it would be a good idea to teach e-prime to NLP people – well, clearly, I think not. But to respond to your question in another way: The real Q would be – what for? To use the traditional NLP phrase, what would be your outcome? What would you want such teaching to do? Let’s assume that, in the spirit of ‘main-line’ NLP and of this Whispering site, two common aims for would-be NeLPers would be to: (a) teach people how to better gather info about other’s model of the world, and (b) give people the means to be more flexible in, and to choose more freely among, their own models, plural, of the world. Yes? OK, then adding to people’s workload by giving them extra and harder stuff to do - such as jumping through the absurd mental hoops that using e-prime usually means - is not, IMHO, a good way to do either of the above. If you are gathering info about another’s MotW, then forcing the other person to use e-prime would not, as far I can see, help you get high-quality stuff. And if you, the info-gatherer/model-maker, are ‘forcing’ everything to be ‘less permanent’ and ‘less rigid’ - on e-prime principle - you’d be contaminating the results, never mind what it would do the rapport. And there is a better way. You may know that a few years back I discovered Sub-Modality Eye-Accessing Cues (SMEACs) – that I can teach you how to read up to eight or nine visual sub-modalities and at the same time up to six or seven auditory sub-modalities - all in one half second - all from the outside. The process of installing this ability takes about four hours, and works with 90 per cent of the people I’ve taught – the 10 per cent who it don’t work with, it’s because they won’t give up their essentially digital (ie second attention) way of dealing with the world. Now, the point of me making that blatant plug is this: one way you can tell – from the outside - whether any given use of the verb IS is rigid is by noticing if the picture accompanying the use of the verb is still or moving, or not. And that’s only one clue to the ‘degree of permanence'.  There are quite a few others, too – and, I maintain, (and I haven’t said too much about this in print before) you can tell the degree of permanence or deeply-heldness of most beliefs – their IS-ness – from some other outside clues. So with that possible, why bother to do it a clumsy way? Put the subject of your modelling through them clumsy linguistic hoops? As to what the use of e-prime might mean for one’s self having more choices in one’s own models of the world – well, there are better ways to do that too. It’s kinda like when I used to teach young journalists – I always wanted to tell them “Beware of ‘low-level’ rules – they won’t make you a better writer. They’ll just jam you up with a poor idea of how to get stuff that’s good.” An example of a low-level rule is when a desk editor tells a young journalist: “There’s too many ‘I’s in your piece – ‘I got up, then I had some breakfast, then I …’ – you gotta take them out – you gotta make it better than this.” What he’s trying to do is to get the person to write more creatively, more adventurously - and he’s write to do so – but the way to do it isn’t to impose low-level, ‘stop-doing-that’ rules. The way to do it is introduce much larger-level, generative rules. (And yes I know that some imposers of e-prime claim to have produced better writing in their students, but I think that was in spite of the restriction, not because of it.) Point is, when someone is a much better writer anyway, and understands in high-level ways what good writing is – like Robert Anton Wilson,say, surely IS - they can, if they so wish, write a piece that is shorn of all the IS’s – and they can do it well – like Robert Anton Wilson has done – but it’s not because they followed low-level rules. High-level rules usually mean choice; low-level rules usually mean restriction. In other words, if you want people to be better at making models of the world – for example, in exploring the gap between first attention and second attention, or how many more distinctions than you though possible can you make about the world? - then don’t hamstring them with low-level rules. Eric Robbie.