Free Online Passive Voice Checker

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Read the counts: total sentences, passive sentences and the percentage that are passive.
3. Scan the highlighted sentences below — each one likely uses the passive voice.
4. Rewrite the ones where the actor matters by making that actor the subject.

The passive voice flips the normal subject-verb-object order so the thing acted upon becomes the subject: 'The report was written by Sarah' instead of 'Sarah wrote the report.' Grammatically, every passive construction combines an auxiliary form of 'to be' (is, are, was, were, been, being) with the past participle of a main verb. That two-part pattern is what this tool looks for, sentence by sentence.

Style guides have flagged the passive for over a century. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' both argue that the active voice is usually more direct, vigorous and concise. The passive is not an error, though — it is the correct choice when the actor is unknown ('The window was broken overnight'), unimportant, or deliberately obscured, and it is standard in scientific method sections. The goal is not zero passives but a low, intentional ratio.

Because English participles are irregular, no rule-based detector is perfect: this tool uses a heuristic (a 'to be' verb within a few words of an -ed or known irregular participle) and may miss or over-flag the odd case. Treat each highlight as a prompt to reread, not a command to rewrite. Everything runs in your browser; your text is never uploaded.