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Passive voice isn't inherently wrong — it has legitimate uses, like when the actor doesn't matter or isn't known ("the window was broken") — but overusing it tends to make writing feel vague, indirect, and less confident than active voice. Most style guides recommend keeping passive voice to a small minority of sentences in most writing.
This tool scans your text sentence by sentence, flags each one that uses passive construction (a "to be" verb paired with a past participle, like "was written" or "is being reviewed"), and shows you the overall percentage of your writing that's passive.
How it works
Paste your text and the tool splits it into sentences, checking each one for a passive voice pattern — a form of "to be" (is, are, was, were, be, being, been) followed by a past participle. It lists every flagged sentence individually along with the overall percentage of passive sentences in your text.
- Paste your text.
- Click Check for Passive Voice.
- Review each flagged sentence and the overall passive percentage.
Examples
Spotting an obvious passive sentence
"The report was written by the team" gets flagged as passive — rewriting it as "The team wrote the report" makes the sentence more direct and typically shorter.
Checking overall passive voice usage
Running a 20-sentence article through the checker and seeing a 25% passive rate flags an opportunity to revise several sentences toward more direct, active phrasing.
Who should use it
- Reviewing a draft article or essay for overuse of passive voice before publishing.
- Checking business writing (emails, reports) for more direct, confident phrasing.
- Learning to recognize passive voice patterns in your own writing over time.
Industry applications
- Content writing and editing
- Business communication
- Academic and technical writing
Advantages
- Flags every individual passive sentence, not just an overall score.
- Shows a clear passive percentage across the whole text.
- Instant, with no signup or word limit up to 20,000 characters.
Limitations
- Pattern-based detection can occasionally flag a false positive or miss an unusual construction.
- Doesn't rewrite sentences for you — you still need to revise flagged ones yourself.
- Doesn't distinguish appropriate uses of passive voice from ones worth revising.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Treating every flagged sentence as automatically wrong rather than using judgment about whether passive voice fits there.
- Over-correcting to eliminate all passive voice, even where it reads more naturally (e.g. "mistakes were made" style admissions, or when the actor is genuinely unknown).
- Not rechecking after revising, since a rewritten sentence can still contain a different passive construction.
Best practices
- Use flagged sentences as prompts to reconsider phrasing, not as errors that must all be fixed.
- Prioritize the most important or most-read sentences (opening lines, headlines) for active-voice revision first.
- Keep passive voice where it's genuinely appropriate — don't force awkward active constructions to eliminate every instance.
Tips
- Don't aim for zero passive voice — aim to reduce unnecessary passive constructions where an active rewrite would be clearer.
- Read a flagged sentence aloud in both its passive and an active rewrite to judge which actually reads better in context.