Passive Voice Checker
Paste your text and passive sentences are highlighted instantly. See how many sentences use passive construction and where they are.
Passive voice is not wrong. It becomes a problem when it dominates your writing, making it feel vague, indirect, or deliberately evasive.
The tool looks for sentences containing a form of "to be" (is, are, was, were, be, been, being) followed by a past participle. This catches the vast majority of passive constructions in English. Some false positives are possible with complex sentence structures, and some passive sentences are genuinely the right choice — use the results as a prompt to review, not as an instruction to change everything.
How we work it out
The tool splits your text into sentences using punctuation, then checks each sentence for passive voice patterns: a to-be verb followed by a past participle (including regular -ed endings and common irregular forms like "written," "given," or "known"). A sentence is flagged if the pattern appears anywhere within it.
Questions
Is passive voice always bad?
No. Passive voice is appropriate when the subject is unknown ("the window was broken"), when the subject is obvious or unimportant, or when you want to emphasise the object of the action. Scientific and legal writing uses passive voice deliberately. The question is whether you are using it by choice or by habit.
What passive rate is acceptable?
Most style guides suggest keeping passive voice below 10-20% of sentences in professional writing. Academic and scientific writing tends to run higher. Business writing and clear communication generally benefits from staying active.
How accurate is the detection?
The heuristic catches most common passive constructions but is not a full grammar parser. It may flag some sentences that are not technically passive (false positives) and miss unusual passive constructions (false negatives). It is a useful quick check, not a definitive audit.
The document is being reviewed. By you. After this.