Instantly detect and highlight every passive voice sentence in your text. Shows passive percentage, sentence count, and highlights each passive construction in context. Includes a quick-reference guide to converting passive sentences to active voice.
Paste an article, essay, email, product description, or any prose. The tool scans every sentence using a multi-pattern passive voice detection algorithm that identifies standard passives, complex passives (with modal auxiliaries), and short passives (without a "by" phrase).
Passive sentences are highlighted in amber directly in your text. The stats panel shows your total sentence count, passive sentence count, and passive voice percentage. A passive rate below 10% is generally considered strong active writing.
Expand any highlighted passive sentence to see a suggested rewrite hint. The quick reference table shows the most common passive constructions and their active equivalents. Download the cleaned analysis as a text report.
In a passive voice sentence, the grammatical subject receives the action rather than performing it. Active: "The team completed the report." Passive: "The report was completed by the team." The passive is formed with a form of "to be" (is, was, were, are, been, being) followed by a past participle (completed, written, found, approved). The "by" phrase naming the actor is often omitted entirely: "The report was completed."
No — passive voice is sometimes the correct choice. Use it when the actor is unknown ("The window was broken"), when the actor is unimportant or obvious ("Mistakes were made"), when you want to emphasise the object ("Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921"), in scientific writing where convention requires it ("The samples were incubated at 37°C"), and in legal and formal documents where objectivity is valued. The problem is overuse — not use.
Style guides vary. The Hemingway Editor flags text above 10% passive as a concern. Yoast SEO recommends keeping passive sentences below 10% for readability. Academic writing commonly runs 20–30% passive by convention. Business writing should aim below 10%. Marketing copy benefits from near-zero passive. This tool shows your exact percentage so you can benchmark against your target.
The tool identifies passive constructions using three pattern types. Standard passive: a "to be" form directly before a past participle ("was written", "is approved", "were found"). Modal passive: an auxiliary modal before "to be" before a past participle ("should be reviewed", "could have been fixed"). Participial passive: past participles in sentences where the implied "to be" is dropped in certain grammatical constructions. The algorithm processes each sentence separately so highlights stay in context.
Past tense simply describes an action that happened in the past ("She finished the project"). Passive voice describes who receives the action regardless of tense ("The project was finished by her" — past passive; "The project is being finished" — present passive). Passive voice always requires a form of "to be" plus a past participle. Past tense uses only the past form of the main verb without a "to be" auxiliary.
Yes, indirectly. Google's algorithms favour content that humans find readable. Passive voice makes text harder to scan and reduces reading ease scores. Yoast SEO includes a passive voice check in its content analysis for this reason. More directly, passive voice in headings, meta descriptions, and CTAs reduces click-through rates because passive constructions are less compelling than direct active language.
