Find passive voice constructions (be + past participle) and get the percentage of passive sentences.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use the passive-voice detector when editing reports, emails, marketing copy, or any writing where you want a more direct, active style. Common targets: keep passive voice under 10% in marketing, under 15% in business reports.
Unlike readability scores, passive-voice detection is a structural metric, not a difficulty metric. Use it alongside Flesch or Fog for a fuller style picture.
Passive voice combines a form of "to be" (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) with a past participle.
This tool scans every sentence for the pattern and highlights matches. Some constructions are ambiguous; treat the results as a guide rather than an absolute count.
A small amount of passive voice is fine — but most engaging writing keeps it under 10%.
We look for "be" forms (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) followed within 3 words by a past participle (verbs ending in -ed, -en, plus common irregulars).
Yes. Use passive when the actor is unknown ("The lock was broken") or when you want to emphasise the action over the actor. Aim for under 10% in most writing.
There is no fixed rule, but many style guides suggest keeping passive sentences under about 10 to 15 percent of the total for clear, direct prose. Technical and scientific writing often runs higher and that is acceptable.
Yes. A 'be' verb followed by an adjective that looks like a past participle, such as 'she is tired,' can trigger a false positive. Always read flagged sentences to confirm they are truly passive before rewriting.
Input
The report was written by the team. The meeting was held in Room 4.
Output
2 of 2 sentences passive (100%) — Very passive.
Both sentences use "was" + past participle ("written", "held"). High passive ratios often signal bureaucratic or evasive writing.
Passive voice is identified by pattern: a form of "to be" followed by a past participle, sentence by sentence. That is the standard heuristic and it is right most of the time, but it is pattern-matching rather than parsing, so it has predictable failure modes in both directions.
False positives come from adjectival participles — "the door was closed" is passive if someone closed it and simply descriptive if it means the door was shut. No surface pattern can separate those. False negatives come from passives that omit the auxiliary, as in reduced relative clauses: "the report submitted last week" is passive in effect with no "was" to find.
Treat the highlighted sentences as candidates for review rather than a verdict. The count is most useful as a relative figure between drafts of the same document.
The advice to eliminate passive voice is over-applied. Passive is the correct choice whenever the object matters more than the actor, when the actor is unknown or irrelevant, or when you need a sentence to begin with old information so it connects to the previous one — which is most of what holds a paragraph together.
Scientific and legal writing use it heavily for good reason. "The samples were incubated at 37 °C" is better than naming whichever technician did it. What to look for is passive used to hide an actor who ought to be named — "mistakes were made" — and passive so dense that the reader cannot tell who is doing anything. A percentage in the teens is unremarkable prose; a percentage in the fifties is worth reading through.
% content words vs. function words.
Text analysisVocabulary variety — type‑token ratio.
Text analysisTotal + per‑word syllable counts.
Text analysisSentence length stats and variety score.