Passive voice finder
Finds passive constructions and explains which ones are actually worth fixing.
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Findings
When passive voice is fine
Not every passive sentence is a problem. A checker that flags all of them loses your trust the first time it's wrong. Here are three cases where passive voice is the right call.
The actor is unknown
"My bike was stolen." You don't know who took it. Naming a subject here would mean guessing, and a guess is worse than no subject at all. Passive voice lets you report what happened without inventing who did it.
The actor doesn't matter
"The bridge was completed in 1932." Nobody reading this needs to know which crew poured the concrete. The bridge is the point, not the builders. Rewriting this as "A crew completed the bridge in 1932" adds a subject nobody asked for.
The passive keeps the topic in view
Good writing holds one idea across several sentences instead of jumping between subjects. "The proposal was reviewed by the finance team. It was rejected the following week." Both sentences keep "the proposal" in the subject position, so the reader never loses the thread. Switching the second sentence to "The finance team rejected it" works too, but it also shifts the spotlight from the proposal to the team — a change worth making on purpose, not by accident.
The test that matters
Ask one question: does naming the actor add anything the reader needs? If it does — if knowing who approved the budget or who broke the vase changes how the reader understands the sentence — active voice usually wins. If it doesn't, or if you genuinely don't know the actor, passive voice is doing its job. That judgment call is exactly why this tool shows you the sentence instead of just telling you it's wrong.
What counts as a lot?
A percentage on its own is hard to read without something to compare it against. We ran this exact rule over 20,710 US federal documents from 2000 to 2025: most agencies land between23% and 31% of sentences containing a passive construction, from the Agriculture Department at 34.5% down to the Postal Regulatory Commission at 10.8%. If your own text sits near a quarter, you are writing about as passively as the federal government — see the Notice/Rule Gap study for the full agency breakdown and the raw data.