Passive Voice Checker

Flip a sentence from passive to active

See who does what move to the front, and what the passive lets a writer hide.

The reportwas writtenby the intern.

Passive · 7 words
The thing acted on comes first; the verb uses a form of “to be” + past participle (“was written”).

Doer highlighted. Passive voice isn’t wrong: it’s the right choice when the doer is unknown or unimportant (“the window was broken overnight”).

How to recognise passive voice

A passive sentence has a form of “to be” (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) or sometimes “get” followed by a past participle: was written, is being built, has been approved, got fired. The checker looks for that pattern, including regular -ed verbs and about 100 irregular participles.

A quick human test: if you can add “by zombies” after the verb and it still makes grammatical sense (“the report was written… by zombies”), it’s passive.

When passive voice is the right choice

The doer is unknown: “My bike was stolen.”
The doer is obvious or irrelevant: “The suspect was arrested.”
You want to keep the focus on the thing acted on, as in scientific methods: “The samples were heated to 80 °C.”

How to change passive to active

Find the doer (often after “by”), move it to the front, and turn the verb into its active form. “The ball was kicked by Maya” becomes “Maya kicked the ball”. If there is no “by”, decide who did it: “Mistakes were made” becomes “We made mistakes”.

Questions people ask

Is passive voice grammatically wrong?

No. It is correct grammar, but it is often longer and vaguer than active voice, which is why style guides such as the Plain Language guidelines recommend using it sparingly.

Why is “I am interested” not flagged?

Words like interested, tired and married usually work as adjectives after “to be”, so the checker skips them to avoid false alarms.

How much passive voice is too much?

There’s no fixed rule. Many editors aim for under about 10% of sentences in general writing. Scientific writing uses more by convention.