How to Find and Fix Passive Voice in Your Writing

You’ve been told your writing leans too passive — in a performance review draft, a blog post, a piece of documentation — but passive voice is genuinely hard to spot in your own writing while you’re focused on content rather than sentence structure. “The report was reviewed by the team” reads perfectly grammatically fine, which is exactly why it’s easy to write dozens of sentences like it without noticing the pattern building up.

Style guides tend to recommend active voice for most everyday writing because it’s usually more direct and easier to read, but “avoid passive voice” as advice is much easier to give than to apply consistently across a full document you’ve already written.

What finding passive voice actually involves

Passive voice restructures a sentence so the object of the action becomes the subject, typically using a form of “to be” plus a past participle — “the ball was thrown by John” instead of “John threw the ball.” Detecting it reliably means recognizing that “to be” + past participle pattern across a wide range of verb forms and sentence structures, not just matching a fixed list of phrases, since passive constructions can appear in almost any tense.

Why people get stuck here

• Passive voice being grammatically correct. Unlike a typo or a genuine grammar error, passive sentences read as completely valid English, so proofreading alone won’t catch them — you have to specifically look for the pattern.
• Not every passive sentence needing to change. Sometimes passive voice is the right choice (when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately being de-emphasized), so blanket “eliminate all passive voice” advice isn’t quite right either.
• Long documents accumulating the pattern unnoticed. A habit that shows up occasionally in a short email becomes a much bigger readability problem across a 2,000-word document if it’s consistent throughout.
• Confusing passive voice with other things entirely. Past tense, weak verbs, and passive voice often get lumped together in casual writing feedback, even though they’re distinct issues that need different fixes.

What a good passive voice detector looks like

Highlights the exact sentences, not just a vague count

A count like “12 passive sentences found” is much less actionable than seeing each flagged sentence individually, in context, ready to edit one at a time.

Recognizes passive constructions across different tenses

Passive voice can appear in past, present, or future tense (“is being reviewed,” “was reviewed,” “will be reviewed”), so a detector that only catches the simplest past-tense pattern will miss a meaningful share of real instances.

Lets you scan quickly without breaking your writing flow

A fast, paste-and-scan tool fits naturally into an editing pass at the end of drafting, rather than requiring you to interrupt your writing to check every sentence as you go.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Treating every flagged sentence as something that must be rewritten — some passive constructions are the right choice for the context.
• Rewriting a sentence into active voice in a way that awkwardly forces an unclear or irrelevant subject just to avoid the passive pattern.
• Running the check only once at the very end, after the document’s structure is already locked in place, rather than as part of an ongoing editing pass.
• Confusing passive voice with simply weak or vague verbs — “there was an increase in sales” is weak writing but not technically passive voice, and needs a different kind of fix.
• Ignoring context — technical and scientific writing often intentionally uses passive voice to keep focus on the process rather than the actor, and that’s a legitimate style choice, not an error.

How to do it with Passive Voice Detector

Online Tool Store’s Passive Voice Detector scans your text entirely in your browser.

1. Open the Passive Voice Detector tool.
2. Paste in your draft.
3. Review the list of flagged passive-voice sentences.
4. Rewrite the ones that genuinely read better in active voice, and leave the rest if passive is the right call there.

Frequently asked questions

Is passive voice always bad writing?

No. It’s often less direct and can make sentences longer than necessary, but it’s genuinely the right choice when the actor is unknown, unimportant, or deliberately de-emphasized — “the building was constructed in 1920” is a perfectly reasonable sentence even though no one knows or cares who specifically built it.

How do I tell if a sentence is passive at a glance?

Look for a form of “to be” (is, was, were, being, been) followed by a past participle, often paired with “by” naming who performed the action — “the email was sent by Sarah” is passive; “Sarah sent the email” is the active rewrite of the same idea.

Does fixing passive voice always make writing better?

It usually makes writing more direct and often shorter, which helps readability in most everyday writing — but it’s one improvement among many, not a guarantee of better writing on its own. Clear structure and concrete detail matter more overall.

Final thought

You don’t need to eliminate passive voice entirely — you need to notice where it’s piling up unintentionally so you can choose active voice where it actually makes the writing clearer.

Try the free Passive Voice Detector tool