I was watching an upload by Prompt Engineering on the SmolAgents agentic rag project. In it they talk about the importance of forming questions in the same affirmative voice that the LLM will respond with. My understanding is fuzzy here. Language is not my strongest subject. So maybe ELI5 please. What is “asking questions in an affirmative voice,” and more importantly, what is it in contrast to other forms of voicing?
‘Affirmative Voice’ is not really a thing, as far as codified English grammar goes.
They may mean active voice:
Or they may mean to simply be affirmative, as in, polite, reassuring, informative, non-confrontational, etc?
Or, if you take ‘voice’ to be the more technical definition within the realm of phonetics, they could mean that you should be pronouncing consonants and vowels in a manner that they personally find affirmative…?
Anyone who is telling you to ‘use an affirmative voice’ is ironically being vague and not really demonstrating a great understanding of English themselves.
It would be less confusing if they said something along the lines of ‘phrase your questions in a non-hostile, affirmative manner.’
English does not have a formally defined ‘affirmative voice’ the way that it does with ‘active voice’, ‘passive voice’, ‘reflexive voice’, ‘reciprocal voice’, etc.