Bingo. There it is. If I learned that in grade school (once known as grammar school) I had forgotten it.
Lol it sounds like amateur poetry where someone tried to make a line fit by reversing it. You know "Today I did wake" Though that really doesn't reverse SVO, does it? It just puts a Today in front of it. All it changes is the fact that it would normally be "Today I woke."
Today, did I wake. I think . . . It always sounds Old Testament. Lo, today did I wake, and the Serephim Azrael, alight with fire, found me forsaken. Saideth He: "Fat Dan has slaked his hunger upon thine nachos." Er, wait. It would be "Today, did wake I." We don't want to speak that way, I guess. The top example might work better. The subject's tangled in the verb. Not sure if that counts. You know, dialog can switch from SVO word order too. "Yer a wizard, Harry," said Hagrid. (OVS) or "Yer a wizard, Harry," Hagrid said. (OSV)
I was thinking of something more like "Her eyes I did see." That's OVS. And not very OT (Old Testament). Or is it? Maybe 'her eyes' automatically becomes the subject. Damn, this is hard! I thought I knew subject and object and verb stuff! EDIT—actually I suppose it could be OT. "His wrath ye shall see, ere the other side ye see." Ok, mixing it up now with MP (Monty Python). And I definitely said See too many times too close together.
Most writers don't have a clue when or how to use passive voice, so they come up with contrivances like your "salt" theory. Even the overrated Strunk and White tell you to "prefer the active voice" but give zero guidance for using passive voice. George Gopen is a rare and invaluable exception. If you want clear, useful guides for using active and passive voice (and much else besides), read his book The Sense of Structure. I've spent my adult life making a living as a writer, but nothing in all those years (including earning master's and doctorate degrees) taught me more about writing than Gopen's book. I give this book the highest possible recommendation.
I really don't give thought to rules like this when I write. But action I need in the sequence I show in writing is there. So I generally fall into using active voice in it, it seems, or it is otherwise more wordy, which I would rather avoid.
^ All I see anymore when I look at him is Willem Dafoe with a white wig (sounds a lot like him too at times).
He has the same jawline as Willem Dafoe, I think. Kind of the same teeth too. That's all you would need to pair them in a buddy cop movie. Dafoe would be the grizzled detective. Pinker would be his long lost grammarian brother. They have to solve a theft of some rare book. They jump away from fiery explosions. Pinker solves mysteries by editing manuscripts. At the end they discover the remains of the Library of Alexandria and it's filled with ancient texts the world thought lost forever. Then working backwards, Pinker has lost his position at his university, and this discovery makes him the most famous grammarian history has ever known. In walking away from his past he reclaims it. Fin. ------------------------ Yeah, I like his style. (pun intended, see "Elements of . . .") If you saw him walking down the street with his George Washington hair you'd know he's a college prof, and when you heard him speak you'd know he's one of those rare profs that have a full lecture hall. Always reminds me of this old math prof I used to have. He would refer to L'Hopital as "the galloping Frenchman," and everyone would laugh. Or they'd shout it out with him. It was always a raucous lecture, like a cultured Morton Downey Jr. Show. That's a very good video, by the way. I've read a book by him railing against "academic style," that sort of passive-verbed, convoluted nonsense he reads off in the beginning much to the audience's delight. I wish I could remember which title it was. I think it was either an ebook or a library-borrow, so I don't see it on my shelf. I remember it talked a lot about right-branching sentences, which was my big takeaway from it. Anyway, I think most people here would enjoy that lecture. He's talking about academic writing, but a lot of it carries over to fiction. Maybe all of it? There's talk about trusting the reader with the content and avoiding "hedging," which is one of my major revision tricks. I always think of it as removing soft phrases and qualifiers. Always consider the absolute, the most intense description, and you'll find it will usually prove itself in the sentence. (see, there's one) Even if it needs to truthfully be dialed back, you trust the reader to understand. Don't hold their hand.
