Passive Voice Detector

Strengthen your prose by identifying and fixing passive voice sentences.

Passive voice hides the subject of a sentence and can make writing feel flat or evasive. Most style guides recommend keeping passive voice below 10% of sentences. Paste your text below to highlight every passive construction instantly — no signup.

  1. Paste your text
  2. Passive sentences are highlighted in red
  3. Check your passive rate and rewrite flagged sentences
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What is Passive Voice?

In passive voice, the subject of the sentence receives the action rather than performing it. While not grammatically incorrect, overusing it can make writing feel heavy, vague, or bureaucratic.

Passive: The report was written by the team.
Active: The team wrote the report.

Our detector looks for "to be" verbs followed by past participles (e.g., "is conducted", "was made", "being sent"). It's a heuristic tool meant to guide your editing, not a perfect grammatical judge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is passive voice and why does it matter?

Passive voice occurs when the subject receives the action instead of performing it, for example 'The report was written by the team' instead of 'The team wrote the report'. Overusing passive voice makes writing feel flat, evasive, and bureaucratic. Most style guides recommend keeping passive voice below 10 percent of sentences.

How does this passive voice checker detect passive sentences?

The detector scans for patterns where a form of 'to be' (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) is immediately followed by a past participle — a word ending in -ed or an irregular form like 'written' or 'made'. It highlights entire sentences matching this pattern so you can review and revise them.

What percentage of passive voice is acceptable in writing?

Most style guides recommend keeping passive voice below 10 percent of sentences. Academic or scientific writing may naturally use slightly more. If more than 20 percent of your sentences are passive, your writing is likely to feel heavy and indirect to readers.

Related tools: Readability Checker · Word Frequency Analyzer