Cirrus@Austlit

'A brief history of a prescriptive English language discipline known as English Prime (E-Prime), a method of writing without use of the copula (the verb to be). Writing in E-Prime requires the author to expose the agent of a sentence and therefore lends itself favourably to other techniques of mimetic storytelling. An examination of my experiments using this constraint for creative writing demonstrates that utilising E-Prime enhances vernacular authenticity, improves clarity, readability and the quality of immersion in a text. The E-Prime constraint offers access to dynamics of language ordinarily subliminal.' (Publication abstract)

'Among my father’s cousins, Walter Lehmann was exceptional in four ways: he kept the double n’s at the end of his surname; having escaped from Nazi Germany, he settled in Australia rather than England or the United States; he wrote poetry; and he was a fictional character, a persona and a pseudonym adopted by Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), an estimable Australian poet.' (Introduction)