Passive voice isn't always wrong, but heavy passive often hides agency in fiction or muddles instructions in technical writing. This detector flags every passive sentence in your text inline and gives you a passivity score.
What is passive voice
Passive voice is when your writing focusses on the object of an action instead of the subject executing the action. It's a valid grammatical construction, but when used often in prose, it may make readers feel detached from the action, instead of immersed in the moments described.Passive: "The window was broken." We know what happened to the window but not who broke it. Reader thinks "Hmm who or what broke that darn window?"
Active: "Tom broke the window." Subject acts on object. Clearer, shorter, more vivid. Reader thinks: "Oh my Gosh, Tom, why did you do that??"
The passive form is built with a "be" verb (is, was, were, been, being, get, got) plus a past participle (broken, eaten, written, thrown). The detector flags this pattern wherever it appears.
When to use passive voice
Passive voice isn't a weed to be trimmed out of your prose, it's useful in certain places. What matters is that you're aware of your choice to use passive voice. It could be useful in these cases:
- The actor is unknown or irrelevant. "The car was stolen overnight." We don't know who and it doesn't matter for the sentence's purpose.
- The receiver is the focus. Medical writing routinely uses passive: "The patient was admitted at 3 a.m." The patient is the focus, the person doing the admitting is not relevant to the story.
- Deliberate obscuring. "Mistakes were made." The construction lets you acknowledge a fact without assigning blame. Politicians love this one.
- Scientific writing. Convention prefers passive in methods sections: "Samples were collected weekly." Tradition, not necessity, but it's the genre expectation.
When passive voice hurts your prose
When passive voice is used, a sense of detachment is felt, such that the story isn't being lived by the reader. Alternatively, when you use active voice, you feel like you're right there in the story, instead of the characters going on without you. Here's where you shouldn't use passive voice:- Hiding the actor when the actor matters. "The decision was made" leaves the reader wondering who decided. If it's your character making the decision, name them.
- Adding length without value. "The cake was eaten by John" is 6 words. "John ate the cake" is 4. Same meaning, faster delivery.
- Distancing the reader from action. Fight scenes, chase scenes, anything kinetic. Passive constructions deflate the urgency. "He was struck by the bullet" reads slower than "The bullet hit him."
- Accidental over-use. Once you write "was [past-participle]" twice, you tend to keep doing it. Unconscious use of passive voice is a grave sin.
How to revise a passive sentence
Once you've identified phrases written in passive voice, you can identify whether they need rewriting to active voice. Once you've determined that, follow this little tutorial on how to do the rewriting:- Find the actor. If there's a "by ..." phrase, the actor is right there. If not, look elsewhere in the sentence or broader context to find your actor.
- Move the actor to the subject position. "The cake was eaten by John" → "John ate the cake."
- Replace "be + participle" with a single verb. "Was struck" becomes "hit". "Was given" becomes "received" or "got". "Was being followed" becomes "followed" or "trailed".
- Decide whether to keep some passive on purpose. Not every flagged sentence needs fixing. The goal is conscious choice, not zero passive voice. Rhyming is also often unconscioice.
Limitations
This is an analytical tool, not AI, and that has some limitations. These problems it cannot solve:Stative passives. "The door is locked" describes a state, not an action being done to the door. The detector flags it because it matches the pattern, but it's not the same problem.
Linking-verb constructions. "She was tired" uses "was" + adjective ending in -ed. The detector won't always tell adjective-tired from past-participle-tired. False positive risk.
Genre judgment. 30% passive in a legal brief is fine. 30% in a thriller is not. The percentage alone tells you nothing. Context does.