Passive Voice Checker

In an active sentence, the subject does the action: "The chef cooked the meal." In a passive sentence, the subject receives the action, and the doer is moved to the end or left out: "The meal was cooked (by the chef)."

Passive constructions are built from a form of to be (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) or sometimes get, followed by a past participle (cooked, written, made, taken). That is the pattern this checker looks for.

Style guides recommend preferring the active voice because it is usually shorter, clearer and more direct, and it makes responsibility obvious. "Mistakes were made" hides who made them; "We made mistakes" does not.

The passive is still correct and sometimes better:

• When the doer is unknown or unimportant: "The museum was built in 1902."
• When you want to focus on the result: "The patient was treated within an hour."
• In scientific methods sections, where the procedure matters more than the person.
• To vary rhythm or keep the topic at the start of consecutive sentences.

As a guide, many editors aim for fewer than about 10% passive sentences in web and business writing.

1. Find who or what performs the action, often after "by". In "The bug was fixed by our engineers", it is "our engineers".
2. Make that the subject at the start of the sentence.
3. Change the verb to the active form: "was fixed" becomes "fixed".
4. Put the original subject after the verb: "Our engineers fixed the bug."

If there is no "by" phrase, decide who did it and add them, or keep the passive if the doer genuinely does not matter.

Like every rule-based grammar tool, this checker uses patterns and can be wrong in both directions. It may flag adjectives that look like participles ("The door was closed" can describe a state rather than an action) and can miss passives with unusual irregular verbs. Common adjectives such as "tired", "excited" and "married" are ignored. Treat the highlights as suggestions to review, not errors.

For an overall picture of how easy your text is to read, use the Readability Checker; for long sentences, the Sentence Counter.