Passive voice finder

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.

Why we show two numbers, and which one to watch

The counter above reports the share of your sentences that contain a passive, and also passives per thousand words. Those are not two views of the same thing, and we used to show only the first one.

We scored 1,398 pairs of English and Simple English Wikipedia articles — the same subject written twice, the second time by people whose only goal was to make it easier. The share of sentences containing a passive fell by 20% between the two. Passives per thousand words did not move at all: 16.6 against 16.4, an interval that comfortably contains zero. The percentage fell because Simple English writes shorter sentences, and a shorter sentence has fewer chances to contain anything.

So the percentage is not a measure of how passive your writing is. It is a measure of how passive your writing is and how long your sentences are, and it will improve on its own every time you split a sentence in two. Watch the per-1,000-words figure if you want to know whether you actually removed a passive — see what simplification is made of for the full measurement and the raw data.

What counts as a lot?

A number 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.

For the density measure, encyclopedia prose is a useful yardstick: 16 to 17 passives per 1,000 words on both English and Simple English Wikipedia. Well-edited general writing that is not trying to avoid the passive lands about there.

A third data point, from the regulator's side: when SEC staff quote a phrase from a filing and call it unclear, that phrase fires this site's passive-voice rule less often than matched prose from the same filing, not more. Widened to the whole sentence the phrase sits in, passive voice is no more common than in the sentences around it either — it looks like the house style of the document, not the thing the regulator was flagging. See what a regulator calls unclear.