Passive Voice Detector
Find passive voice sentences in your text and see how to make them more direct.
About Passive Voice Detector
The Passive Voice Detector scans your text sentence by sentence, flagging constructions that use a form of “to be” followed by a past participle. Passive voice is grammatically correct but can make writing feel indirect or evasive. This tool highlights every passive sentence in amber, shows you the percentage of passive usage, and offers a rewrite prompt for each flagged sentence so you can decide — quickly and deliberately — whether to keep or revise it.
What it does not flag, on purpose.A form of “to be” followed by an -edword is not automatically the passive voice. “He was tired” and “she is interested” describe a state, so they are treated as predicate adjectives rather than passive constructions — unless an agent makes the difference explicit, as in “she was married bythe priest”. Words that merely end in -edwithout being participles at all (“red”, “indeed”, “sacred”, “hundred”) are excluded, and only an adverb may sit between the two halves, so “that was the man who walked past” does not match.
This is a rule-based heuristic, not a part-of-speech tagger — everything runs in your browser with no upload, and a real tagger would be several megabytes. Expect it to miss unusual constructions, and treat the percentage as a prompt to reread rather than a verdict.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Finding passive constructions in a draft to consider rewriting.
- Checking documentation for sentences that hide the actor.
- Reviewing writing from several contributors for consistency.
- Learning to spot the pattern by seeing it flagged.
- Tightening copy where the subject matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is passive voice identified?
- By its grammatical shape: a form of "to be" followed by a past participle — "was written", "is being considered". Detection is heuristic because participles and simple past tense often share a form, so "the door closed" and "the door was closed" differ structurally.
- Is passive voice actually wrong?
- No, and the blanket advice against it is overstated. It is the right choice when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately de-emphasised — scientific writing uses it for exactly that reason. The problem is unconscious overuse, not the construction.
- What does it cost when overused?
- Clarity and length. Passive constructions are longer, and they permit the actor to be omitted entirely — "mistakes were made" is the canonical example of a sentence engineered to have no subject. That evasion is why editors flag it.
- How do I convert a sentence to active?
- Find who did it and put them first. "The report was reviewed by the committee" becomes "The committee reviewed the report" — shorter, and it names the responsible party. If you cannot identify the actor, that is worth noticing rather than working around.
- Why does the detector flag sentences that are not passive?
- Because "was" plus an adjective looks identical to "was" plus a participle. "The room was dark" is a plain description and "the room was decorated" is passive, and telling them apart needs real part-of-speech tagging rather than pattern matching.
Common errors and gotchas
- Treating every passive as a fault, when it is the right choice where the actor is unknown or irrelevant.
- Rewriting a passive into a longer, clumsier active sentence.
- Missing passives the heuristic cannot see, since detection is pattern-based rather than grammatical.
- Flagging a past participle used as an adjective, which is not a passive at all.
- Rewriting a passive whose subject is genuinely unknown, which forces an invented actor.