Yep, I'm familiar with it. While I think eliminating "to be" is more than I'm willing to do, the thought process that it requires is useful. You have to figure out whether you're talking about a thing possessing a characteristic ("The chair is red"), is a member of a category ("Police officers are public servants"), being in a state ("I'm hungry"), a thing being the same thing as another thing ("The butler is the murderer!"), or any number of other conditions that we all put under the rubric of "is".