Highlight every passive construction in your draft, see what share of your sentences use it, and turn the ones that hide the actor into active voice.
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Sentences with passive voice
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Passive constructions in your text
Passive constructions will be underlined in blue here.
Rewrite passive sentences with AI
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Add at least a couple of sentences first.
How a checker spots the passive, step by step
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Find a form of “be” or “get”: am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, got…
Is the next verb a past participle? Regular ones end in -ed; irregular ones (written, built, eaten) come from a list. Words like “being” or “not” can sit in between.
Is there a “by” phrase? Optional. It names the actor and is the key to an active rewrite.
When to keep the passive
The actor is unknown: “My bike was stolen.”
The actor is obvious or irrelevant: “The suspect was arrested.”
You want the object in focus: “Penicillin was discovered in 1928.”
Scientific methods sections, where convention prefers “samples were heated” over “we heated the samples” (though many journals now accept both).
When to rewrite it
Rewrite when the passive makes the reader work harder: when it hides who is responsible (“mistakes were made”), when it stacks up (“it was decided that the policy would be reviewed”), or when the active version is shorter. Active sentences usually lose two or three words and gain a clear subject, which also nudges readability scores up.
Passive voice isn’t measured by readability formulas directly, but it tends to lengthen sentences, which they do measure. Check the effect on the readability checker after you edit.
Passive voice FAQ
What is passive voice?
A sentence where the thing acted on becomes the subject: “The email was sent by Sam” instead of “Sam sent the email.” It is built from a form of “be” (or “get”) plus a past participle, optionally followed by “by” and the actor.
Is passive voice wrong?
No. It is useful when the actor is unknown or unimportant (“The museum was built in 1902”) or when you want to keep the focus on the object. It becomes a problem when it hides who is responsible or makes sentences longer for no reason.
How much passive voice is too much?
Many editors and tools such as Yoast suggest keeping passive sentences to about 10% of the total. Scientific and legal writing often use more, by convention.
How accurate is this passive voice checker?
It uses rules, not a language model, so it runs instantly and privately. It catches most “be + participle” patterns, including irregular verbs like written, taken and built. It can flag adjectives that look like participles (“she is tired”) and miss passives without a “be” verb. The AI button can rewrite the flagged sentences for you.
How do I change passive voice to active?
Find who did the action (often after “by”), make them the subject, and put the verb in active form: “Mistakes were made by the team” → “The team made mistakes.” If there is no actor, decide whether naming one helps the reader.