Passive Voice Checker

This is a free passive voice checker that runs entirely in your browser. There is no signup, no account, no word limit beyond the 10,000-character box, and no paid tier above it — the thing other checkers put behind a subscription is the thing this page leads with. Nothing you paste is uploaded, because there is no server to upload it to.

It is also built on a position, so it is worth stating up front:passive voice is correct English. It is not a grammatical error, it is not a sign of weak writing, and a page of them is not a page of mistakes. What a checker can honestly do is show you where the passives are, tell you which ones it is confident about, and leave the judgement with you. That is what this one does.

What is passive voice?

A passive clause in English is a form of the verb befollowed by a past participle, optionally followed by aby phrase naming the agent. "The reportwas reviewed by the committee" is passive. "The committee reviewed the report" is the active version of the same event.

The difference is not about who did what — both sentences report the same thing. The difference is which noun gets the subject position, which is to say which noun the sentence is about. In the passive, the thing the action happened to comes first and the actor moves to the end or disappears. That is a real, useful choice, and it is the reason the passive exists.

The forms passive voice takes

Naive checkers look for "was" plus an "-ed" word and stop there, which misses most of the passives in real prose. All of these are passive, and this tool catches all of them:

The modal case matters more than its one row suggests. "Can be found," "should be avoided," "must be completed," "will be sent" are the backbone of academic and technical prose, and they are exactly what is sitting in the draft of anyone who searched for this tool.

When passive voice is the right choice

This is the section most checkers do not have, and it is the reason this one exists. The passive is not a loophole in English grammar; it is a tool with specific jobs. Here are the jobs.

1. The agent is unknown.

The window was broken sometime overnight.

You cannot write that actively without inventing a culprit. "Someone broke the window" says less and pretends to more.

2. The agent is irrelevant or obvious.

She was arrested on Tuesday.

Nobody needs the arresting officer's name. Adding it would push the sentence's actual subject out of the position a reader is looking in.

3. The patient is the topic.

English prefers given information before new information, and prefers a paragraph's topic in subject position. If the paragraph is about the report, "the report was reviewed" keeps the report where the reader's attention already is. Turning it active moves the topic into the middle of the sentence and makes the paragraph harder to follow — which is the opposite of what a style checker is supposed to help with.

4. The convention of the field.

Methods sections in scientific papers conventionally foreground the procedure rather than the researcher. That is a disciplinary norm, and many journals still expect it. A student who runs their methods section through a checker and rewrites every sentence is being actively harmed by that tool.

5. Deliberate agent suppression, in diplomatic, legal and institutional writing, where naming a party is itself a decision with consequences.

And then the honest flipside, because this page is not a defence brief. Agent suppression is also how people dodge responsibility. "Mistakes were made" is the canonical example, and it is canonical for a reason. Passive voice is not a sin, but it is a place where a writer sometimes hides, and that is a genuinely good reason to look at your own passives. Separately, a pile-up of nominalizations plus passives plus long noun phrases really is hard to read, and passives are a convenient marker for where that pile-up is happening even when each individual passive is fine.

Further reading, and the sources this section leans on: the Purdue OWL on active and passive voice, its companion page on when the passive is appropriate, and Geoffrey K. Pullum's "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive"(Language & Communication, 2014), which documents how often the people condemning the passive cannot reliably identify one.

How to change passive voice to active voice

When you do decide a sentence should be active, the swap is mechanical:

1. Find the actor. Usually it is sitting in a "by" phrase.
2. Move the actor into the subject position, at the front, and fix its case if it is a pronoun — "by him" becomes "he".
3. Turn the participle into a simple past tense verb and move the original subject into the object position.

Worked twice:

The report was reviewed by the committee.
→ The committee reviewed the report.

The proposal had been rejected by the board.
→ The board rejected the proposal.

And the case where you should not. "Mistakes were made" has no actor. To make it active you have to decide who made them. If you know, say so, and the sentence becomes much better for a reason that has nothing to do with voice. If you genuinely do not know, or you have a reason not to name them, the passive is the correct choice and no tool should be nudging you out of it. This checker will not offer a rewrite when there is no agent, and it says why rather than quietly staying silent.

How this checker finds passive voice, and what it can get wrong

It scans for a form of be — am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, plus the contractions — and then walks forward up to four words looking for a past participle. Only adverbs, "being" and "been" are allowed in between. Hitting a determiner, a preposition, a comma or a conjunction aborts the walk immediately, which is what keeps "He was a forgotten man" and "It is the finished draft" off the list. That one guard is three lines of code and most free checkers do not have it.

Findings come back in three tiers, and they are shown separately on purpose:

• Clear. An agent is named in a "by" phrase, or the participle is one that has no adjective career at all — written, taken, chosen, spoken, stolen, driven.
• Likely. A clean participle with no agent named. This is the ordinary case and most of your findings will be here.
• Borderline. The genuinely ambiguous ones. "She was interested in the data" is "be" plus a past participle, which is the shape of a passive — but "interested" is working as an adjective describing a state rather than something that happened to her. Most readers will not hear it as passive voice at all.

The borderline tier is not a hedge, it is the honest representation of a construction that is genuinely ambiguous. "The door was closed" can describe an event (somebody closed it) or a state (it was not open), and no amount of pattern matching resolves that without context. Every other checker either flags those as errors or silently drops them. This one shows them, labels them, and explains the ambiguity.

Some deliberate behaviours worth knowing about:

• Words that only look like participles are never flagged.Sacred, wicked, learned, naked, rugged, crooked, beloved, jagged and their friends are adjectives. They are on a hard stop list.
• "Was born" is never flagged. See the FAQ.
• Get-passives get their own class. "He got fired" is a real passive and it is informal, which is usually exactly right for the sentence it is in. No rewrite is ever offered for one.
• "Used to" is disambiguated by what follows it. "The key was used to open the door" is passive; "She was used to the noise" is not.

And the limits, stated plainly: it cannot resolve genuinely ambiguous adjectival passives, and neither can a human without context. It works on English only. It will occasionally miss a passive with an unusual intervening phrase, and will occasionally flag a stative that reads as active. It is a rule set, not a parser — a full parse would be more accurate and would cost several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, which would slow the page down for a gain most people would never notice. If you think a finding is wrong, the Not passive? link on any card tells us, and those reports are what move words between the lists.

Irregular past participles

Regular verbs form their past participle with "-ed", which is easy. The irregular ones are the list below, and they are the half of the problem a checker has to carry as data. This is the reference table this page ships with — useful whether or not you use the tool.

These are the irregular participles with a simple past form different enough to matter when you are converting a sentence to the active:

And the full set of irregular past participles the checker recognizes, 154 of them, including both the British and American variants (burnt and burned, learnt and learned, spelt and spelled), because a checker that only knows one of each will miss half of somebody's draft:

• arisen
• awoken
• beaten
• become
• been
• begun
• bent
• bet
• bitten
• bled
• blown
• born
• borne
• bought
• bound
• bred
• broadcast
• broken
• brought
• built
• burnt
• burst
• cast
• caught
• chosen
• clung
• come
• cost
• crept
• cut
• dealt
• done
• drawn
• dreamt
• driven
• drunk
• dug
• dwelt
• eaten
• fallen
• fed
• felt
• fled
• flown
• forbidden
• forgiven
• forgotten
• forsaken
• fought
• found
• frozen
• given
• gone
• ground
• grown
• had
• heard
• held
• hidden
• hit
• hung
• hurt
• kept
• knelt
• known
• laid
• lain
• leant
• leapt
• learnt
• led
• left
• lent
• let
• lit
• lost
• made
• meant
• met
• mistaken
• mown
• overcome
• paid
• proven
• put
• quit
• read
• ridden
• risen
• run
• rung
• said
• sat
• seen
• sent
• set
• sewn
• shaken
• shed
• shone
• shot
• shown
• shrunk
• shut
• slain
• slept
• slid
• smelt
• sold
• sown
• sped
• spelt
• spent
• spilt
• split
• spoiled
• spoilt
• spoken
• spread
• sprung
• spun
• spat
• stolen
• stood
• struck
• strung
• stuck
• stung
• sung
• sunk
• swept
• swollen
• sworn
• swum
• swung
• taken
• taught
• thought
• thrown
• thrust
• told
• torn
• trodden
• undertaken
• understood
• upset
• woken
• won
• worn
• wound
• woven
• wept
• withdrawn
• written

Several of these double as simple past forms — said, put, cut, read, hit, set, cost, hurt, let, spread, shut, bet. That ambiguity does not cause trouble here, because the rule only fires after a form of "be", and "was said" is passive either way.

Does passive voice affect readability?

Less than the folklore claims, and not in the direction people assume. Readability formulas like Flesch Reading Ease — which this page prints in the small stats row under the summary, alongside the numbers our reading time calculator uses — are built from sentence length and syllable count. They do not detect voice at all. A passive sentence and its active twin score almost identically unless the rewrite changed the length.

Where the passive genuinely does cost a reader is when it stacks: a long noun phrase, turned into a noun, in a passive clause, with the actor missing, three times in a paragraph. The individual passives are not the problem there, but they are a reliable marker of where the problem is. That is the useful way to read a page full of blue underlines — as a heat map of where your prose got dense, not as a list of errors.

Checking adverbs as well

The same engine has a second lens for word choice rather than syntax. If you want to see every -ly word in your draft — and, separately, the ones bolted onto dialogue tags, which is the one case where the famous advice holds up — the adverb checker is the same tool with that lens on by default. You can also flip the Adverbs chip above without leaving this page.

Frequently asked questions