Paste any text and instantly see every passive sentence highlighted. Shows passive %, sentence count, and a rating. Runs in your browser — nothing sent to a server.
Want to fix passive voice, not just find it? The Passive Voice Remover auto-suggests active rewrites and applies them in one click.
Passive Voice Remover →Want filler words + long sentences too? The Clarity Checker scores all three patterns with a full clarity score.
Clarity Checker →Passive voice is a sentence construction where the subject receives the action rather than performs it. "The report was written by the team" is passive. "The team wrote the report" is active. Passive voice is grammatically correct but typically makes writing feel indirect and harder to follow.
Find the be-verb (is, are, was, were, been) and the past participle. Identify who is actually doing the action. Make that person or thing the subject and rewrite: [subject] [active verb] [object]. Example: "The data was analysed by researchers" → "Researchers analysed the data."
Under 10% is good for most general writing. 10–25% is moderate — acceptable in some contexts. Above 25% typically weakens impact and clarity. Academic and scientific writing uses more passive intentionally to maintain an objective tone.
Indirectly. Google's quality raters look for content that is "accurate and clear." Heavy passive voice increases reading difficulty, raising bounce rates — a negative engagement signal. Yoast SEO also flags passive voice as a readability issue above 10%.
Completely free. Analysis runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a server at any point.
Passive voice is the single most common writing habit that professors mark down, editors flag, and readability tools penalize. It is not wrong — passive voice has legitimate uses in scientific writing, when the actor is unknown, and when the receiver of the action is the focus of the sentence. But overused, it makes content feel evasive, bureaucratic, and weak. This free passive voice checker detects every passive construction using a pattern-matching engine that identifies be-verb + past participle combinations, including common irregular past participles that simpler tools miss. No AI, no server round-trip — analysis runs entirely in your browser as you type.
Students use it before submitting essays — passive voice is one of the first patterns English professors penalize in academic writing. SEO writers use it alongside the readability checker to reduce bounce rates and improve E-E-A-T signals. For a full writing audit that also catches filler words and long sentences, run the clarity checker — it includes passive voice detection alongside two additional pattern categories and an overall clarity score.