I dreamed there was a writing style called "active passive voice"; here's a description and an invitation to discuss (467 words)
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A little bit ago I woke up from a dream in which I encountered a style guide that called for the use of something called "active passive voice".
The dreamIn the dream, "active passive voice" was a special form of passive voice that requires the author to follow passive voice descriptions of actions that occurred with an exhaustive description of all lines of evidence indicating who was responsible for the action having occurred. In the dream these descriptions were also in passive voice, although my (still recently awakened) waking brain is 90% certain that it isn't really possible to do this without making use of the active voice.
The important part was that the documentation truly be meticulous. In the dream, this seemed like a potentially good idea, but not an obviously good idea, and I wanted to talk about it more. Now that I'm awake, I think it's probably a bad idea but with some potentially good ideas folded up in it, and... I kind of still want to talk about it more, and would love to hear thoughts from others.
Additional thoughts from my waking brain: 1) To give an idea of what level of documentation my dream-brain imagined, I think that the descriptions wouldn't so much be "this side of the house looks white" as "if my memory serves, then there is a scene in the 1991 English language edition of the novel _Stranger in a Strange Land_ (which according to the cover and title page is by Robert A. Heinlein) in which the main character Michael Valentine Smith describes the color of a house as 'this side of the house looks white.'" Perhaps you can see the difficulty in actually writing this kind of documentation in the passive voice. If you think this can be done, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
2) I feel like there's a certain similarity between the premise of this kind of documentation and Wikipedia-speak.
3) There might also be a similarity to the way conspiracy theorists talk?
4) My half-awake brain thought this was almost the opposite of E-Prime (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime), but thinking about it more, I feel like there might actually be important similarities to E-Prime.
5) I'm sure my sleeping brain wasn't smart enough to think of this, but thinking this over now, I feel like the reason why this writing style would have the word "active" in it is the sheer amount of effort that would be required to write this way and possibly also to read text written this way.
6) I think part of why I am intrigued by this cultural hallucination from my sleeping brain is that the premise gets at both how we use language and where knowledge comes from, I guess because I am that kind of nerd.
(boosts are fine, but I can't say that my brain is 100% in gear right now, so use your judgment I guess?)
