“Is” often becomes one of those over-appreciated words in the English language. Students tend to use it to the exclusion of many other verbs, because they rarely remember how to transform words from adjectives to nouns, and vice versa.
An easy way around this involves teaching students to search for and replace examples of the verb “to be”, and write around the word. A few weeks of writing this way can change a student’s whole habit of writing so that the verb forms of “to be” disappear completely.
