Paste a paragraph, essay, or book chapter to highlight every passive voice construction ('was written', 'has been approved', 'mistakes were made') as you type. Grammarly blurs out passive voice alerts on its free tier; this detector runs 100% free in your browser.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
To convert passive voice into active voice, ask: who performed the action? Move that person or thing to the front of the sentence in front of an active verb.
| Passive Sentence (Flagged) | Active Rewrite | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| The quarterly budget was approved by the board on Tuesday. | The board approved the quarterly budget on Tuesday. | Moves the actor ('the board') to the front and cuts two words. |
| Mistakes were made during the rollout of the new pricing page. | Our product team broke the checkout flow during the pricing rollout. | Fixes the classic evasive passive ('mistakes were made') by naming who acted. |
| It was decided by the editors that the chapter should be cut. | The editors cut the chapter. | Eliminates double passive construction and drops from 12 words to 5. |
| The manuscript had been rejected by six agents before it was bought. | Six agents rejected the manuscript before HarperCollins bought it. | Restores narrative momentum and names both subjects. |
A sentence is in the passive voice when the grammatical subject receives the action instead of doing it. Structurally, English builds the passive voice by combining a form of to be (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) with a past participle (written, built, chosen, seen, held).
Editors often use the “by zombies” test: if you can insert “by zombies” immediately after the verb and the sentence still makes grammatical sense (“The report was submitted [by zombies]”), it is passive. If you want a desktop or browser extension that rewrites passive sentences into active voice with one click across Gmail and Google Docs, see our Grammarly review and our Grammarly alternatives benchmark.
It scans your text in real time in your browser for forms of the verb 'to be' (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) followed by past participles (such as written, made, approved, given, taken), including cases separated by an adverb like 'was never approved'. It also computes your passive sentence percentage so you can keep it below the 10% benchmark.
Grammarly Free counts passive voice under its yellow 'Clarity' alerts, which are blurred out unless you upgrade to Grammarly Pro ($12/month billed annually). You can use our free passive voice checker above with no word limit, or pair it with ProWritingAid and Hemingway App.
For business writing, journalism, blog posts, and fiction, aim to keep passive voice under 10% of your total sentences (and under 5% for fast-paced commercial fiction). Scientific and legal papers naturally run higher (15% to 25%) when the method or object matters more than the researcher.
Keep the passive voice when the actor is unknown ('the window was shattered overnight'), when the receiver of the action is the true subject of the paragraph ('the vaccine was distributed to forty clinics'), or in scientific methods sections where naming 'we' in every sentence becomes repetitive.
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