Passive voice checker

A passive voice checker reads your text, marks the sentences built in the passive voice and shows what share of the total they represent. One rule applies to almost all clear writing: the doer comes before the action. When the subject hides behind the verb, the sentence gets longer, slower and harder to follow.

What the passive voice is

In the active voice, the subject performs the action: “the team wrote the article”. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action and the doer disappears or moves to the end: “the article was written by the team”. In English, the passive usually pairs a form of “to be” (is, are, was, were, be, been, being) with a past participle (ending in -ed or an irregular form), as in “was published”, “are reviewed” or “will be sent”.

Active voice vs passive voice

The same idea almost always fits both voices. See how the active version gets shorter and says clearly who did what.

Why the active voice helps clarity and SEO

• Shorter sentences: the active voice drops the helper verb and the word “by”, which cuts the word count.
• Visible actor: the reader knows at once who does the action, with no need to backtrack.
• Faster reading: direct text raises readability, and readability improves the on-page experience.
• Better SEO signals: pages that read easily tend to keep readers longer, and that engagement helps search performance.
• More likely to be cited by AIs: assistants like ChatGPT extract short, objective sentences better.

A good target for most writing is to keep the passive voice below about 10% of sentences. Above that, the text tends to feel slow and impersonal.

When the passive voice is the better choice

The passive voice is not a mistake. It helps when the doer is unknown or irrelevant, when the focus is the result rather than who caused it, or when you want a more formal, impersonal tone.

• When the actor is obvious or barely matters: “the product was launched in 2010”.
• When the focus is the object of the action: “the vaccine was approved after months of testing”.
• In scientific and legal writing, where impersonal style is a convention.
• When you want to soften a critique: “the deadline was missed” sounds less accusatory.

How to turn passive into active

• Find who performs the action. If the sentence has “by someone”, that someone becomes the subject.
• Move that subject to the start of the sentence.
• Swap the “to be” + participle for a direct action verb: “was written” becomes “wrote”.
• Reread it: the active version should get shorter and say clearly who did what.
• If there is no clear actor and the result is what matters, it is fine to keep the passive.

How this tool detects the passive voice

The tool uses a language-pattern heuristic: it looks for a form of “to be” followed by a past participle within the same sentence. It is a fast approximation that runs in your browser, so it may flag an active sentence by mistake or miss a passive one outside the pattern. Use the result as a guide for editing, not as an absolute rule.