Passive Voice Checker

How to use

1. 1Paste an essay, article, email, marketing page, or any block of writing into the input area. Click Load sample to see how the checker treats a paragraph that mixes passive and active voice.
2. 2Read the Passive ratio band at the top right: under 10% is generally accepted as plain language, 10% to 20% is moderate, and over 20% is high.
3. 3Scroll the Highlighted preview to read each sentence in place. Amber underline marks a likely passive construction; rose marks a passive with an explicit "by ..." agent.
4. 4Tick Show only flagged sentences to focus on the passages that need rewriting, and use the chip list below each sentence to copy the exact matched phrase.
5. 5Click Copy report to grab a plain-text summary you can paste into an editor's email, a code review, or a writing log. Click Clear text to start over.

About this tool

Passive Voice Checker scans any draft, article, email, or page of marketing copy for passive-voice constructions. It splits the text into sentences, walks each sentence once, and flags every span that matches a form of "be" (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) or a "get" passive (get, gets, got, gotten, getting) followed by a past participle. Intervening adverbs are skipped so "was clearly written" and "is not approved" still match, and a small set of common irregulars (taken, given, written, brought, made, kept, told, thought, sold, and many more) is checked alongside the regular -ed and -d endings. When an explicit agent phrase appears within seven tokens of the participle (the classic "... by the committee" form), the match is upgraded to a passive-with-agent and highlighted in rose so the most textbook examples stand out. The tool also calculates a passive ratio (passive sentences divided by total sentences) and bands it into Low, Moderate, or High against the plain-language norm of roughly ten percent. A per-sentence preview shows every flag in place so you can decide whether to rewrite or keep each one. Useful for blog editors, students writing essays, technical writers preparing release notes, marketers tightening landing pages, and anyone running a plain-language audit on existing copy. This is a heuristic, not a parser, so adjectival predicates like "is tired", fixed expressions, and unusual phrasing can produce occasional false positives or misses; treat each flag as a suggestion to review. Everything runs locally in the browser, so the drafts, contracts, and unpublished copy you paste never reach a server. Pair this checker with the Readability Score Checker for Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG grade-level scoring, the Filler Word Counter for hedges and cliches, the Word Counter for live word and reading-time stats, and the Text Cleaner for whitespace and duplicate-line cleanup.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.