E-Primer - Instructions

A browser-based tool for checking text against e-prime writing rules.

About Page

E-Primer is a text analysis tool. It accepts text and checks for words that may break e-prime writing constraints.

Use it to practice testing:

  • text input and output handling
  • large input and empty input behaviour
  • punctuation, whitespace, mixed case, and copied text
  • browser-only JavaScript processing
  • usability of feedback and highlighting

Learn About E-Prime

E-Prime, or English Prime, means writing English without forms of the verb “to be” such as is, are, was, were, be, being, and been.

The idea grew from general semantics and Alfred Korzybski’s concern with language that treats labels as reality. Korzybski criticised patterns such as the “is of identity” and the “is of predication”, where a sentence can make an interpretation sound like a fact:

The user is careless.

An E-Prime rewrite pushes the writer toward observable detail:

The user clicked Delete after the confirmation dialog appeared.

D. David Bourland Jr. later expanded this into E-Prime, a restricted form of English that avoids all uses of “to be”. Bourland published the idea in the 1965 essay “A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime” and helped develop E-Prime through later anthologies such as To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology.

E-Prime does not magically make writing accurate, and some writers find it awkward. As an exercise, though, it can force a useful pause: have I described what I observed, or have I labelled the situation too quickly?

Good starting points:

E-Prime And Bug Reports

E-Prime can help testers write bug reports with fewer hidden assumptions. A bug report usually works best when it describes the observed behaviour, the context, and the evidence.

Instead of:

The checkout is broken.

Try:

Checkout returned HTTP 500 after I clicked Pay with Visa ending 1111.

Instead of:

The validation message is wrong.

Try:

The page showed "Success" after I submitted an email address without an @ character.

Instead of:

The bug is intermittent.

Try:

I reproduced the failure in 3 of 10 attempts using Chrome on Windows.

Using E-Prime while drafting can make a report more specific:

  • replace labels with observations
  • replace blame with actions
  • replace certainty with evidence
  • include conditions, inputs, outputs, and frequency
  • distinguish what you saw from what you inferred

Automated Execution

The app is a good target for simple UI automation because the input, action control, and output are all visible on one page.

Model the text you submit, then assert on the visible result rather than only checking that the page changed.

Exploratory Testing

Try building a small suite of sample paragraphs:

  • text with no e-prime issues
  • text with one obvious issue
  • text with repeated issues
  • text with unusual whitespace or punctuation
  • very long text copied from another source

Keep notes about what the app appears to count as a match.