As an exercise, try writing in E-Prime[1], instead of regular English. Its a "variant" of English where the phrase "to be" and any variant of it ("be", "is", "am", "are", "was", "were", "been," "being" and their variants).
In High School, I had an English teacher who made us write like this for a few months. There is a noticeable difference between something I wrote directly before and after writing in E-Prime for a few months. I hated it at the time (writing in E-Prime forced me to think about every word I was writing). Few years down the line, the exercises are one of the biggest things that have stuck with me.