Passive Voice Checker
Paste your writing and instantly see which sentences use passive voice β with a score and plain-English fixes.
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What Is a Passive Voice Checker?
Passive voice happens when the subject of a sentence receives the action instead of performing it β for example, "the report was written by the team" instead of "the team wrote the report." It isn't grammatically incorrect, but leaning on it too often can make writing feel distant, wordy, and harder to follow, which matters most in blog posts, emails, product pages, and marketing copy where directness drives clicks and conversions.
This tool scans whatever text you paste in, breaks it into individual sentences, and checks each one for the passive construction β a form of "to be" (is, are, was, were, been, being) paired with a past participle such as "written," "made," or "given." Every sentence flagged as passive gets highlighted directly inside your text, so you can see at a glance where the voice shifts, how often it happens, and whether it clusters in one part of your writing rather than being spread out evenly.
Search-engine and readability tools like Hemingway and Yoast also flag passive voice because it tends to lower readability scores, and readers scanning on mobile screens are quicker to bounce from sentences that bury the actor halfway through. Keeping your active-to-passive ratio high is one of the simplest ways to make copy feel more direct and easier to skim.
How the Score Is Calculated
Each piece of text is checked against four weighted factors:
| Factor | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Active voice ratio | The percentage of sentences written in active voice rather than passive β the single biggest factor in the overall score. |
| Passive sentence count | How many passive sentences appear relative to the total, since occasional passive use is normal but frequent use weakens writing. |
| Passive streak | Whether passive sentences cluster together in a row, which reads more awkwardly than passive sentences spread evenly throughout a piece. |
| Word efficiency | Whether your passive sentences are adding unnecessary length compared to how they'd read if rewritten in active voice. |
Common Passive Patterns to Watch For
A few passive patterns show up again and again in everyday writing, and each one has a quick, natural fix:
- Was/were + past participle: "The email was sent yesterday." Add who sent it to make the sentence active.
- Is/are + past participle: "Mistakes are made during the process." Name who's making them for clarity.
- Been + past participle: "The changes have been approved." Say who approved them if it matters to the reader.
Tips for Reducing Passive Voice
Look for a "by" phrase right after the verb β sentences like "the decision was made by the manager" almost always rewrite cleanly as "the manager made the decision," moving the true subject to the front of the sentence and cutting a few unnecessary words along the way.
Not every passive sentence needs fixing, though. Passive voice works well when the actor is unknown, unimportant, or intentionally left out, as in "the window was broken" when nobody knows who broke it, or in formal and scientific writing where the process matters more than who performed it.
If a sentence feels heavy or unclear, try reading it out loud β passive constructions often add extra words without adding meaning, and trimming them tightens the pace of your writing considerably. Small, consistent edits like these add up across a full page of copy, making even long-form content feel tighter and more confident. For more on how voice affects sentence structure and reader perception, see the Wikipedia entry on passive voice.
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