Passive Voice Checker: Find Every Passive Sentence

A passive sentence puts the receiver of an action first and pushes the doer to the end, or drops it. Grammatically it has a recognizable shape: a form of "to be" (is, was, were, has been, will be, being) or "get," followed by a past participle. "The results were analyzed." "The bridge is being rebuilt." "Mistakes were made."

The checker looks for that shape, including adverbs in between ("was quickly approved") and irregular participles like written, taken, and built. It skips common adjectives that look like participles, such as tired, interested, and married, because "She was tired" describes a state rather than an action done to her.

No, and a good checker should not pretend otherwise. Passive voice is the right choice when the doer is unknown ("The painting was stolen in 1990"), unimportant, or obvious, and much scientific writing uses it in methods sections on purpose. The problem is overuse: a paragraph where every sentence is passive feels vague and slow, and readers lose track of who did what.

A useful benchmark is that many editors flag writing when more than about 10 percent of sentences are passive, and style guides for journalism and business aim lower still. Your verdict line under the stats uses those bands: mostly active, some passive worth a look, or heavy passive voice.

Pattern matching catches the vast majority of passive constructions but it is not a full grammar parser. Rare cases slip through, such as passives without a "be" verb ("I had my car washed"), and a few adjective uses of participles ("The door was closed all day") will be flagged even though they describe a state. Treat each highlight as a prompt to reread the sentence, not as an error.