Passive Voice Detector
Find sentences that are probably passive, with the rule that flagged each one so you can dismiss the wrong ones.
About this tool
Flags sentences that look like they are in the passive voice, and shows the rule that fired for each.
That second part is the point. Finding passive voice properly needs a parser; without one you are guessing that a word after "was" is a past participle, and that guess is wrong often enough to be a nuisance. "The results were interesting" is not passive. "The door was closed" is genuinely ambiguous — it could be a state or an action — and no tool can settle it.
So nothing here is reported as a verdict. Each sentence comes with the phrase that triggered it, which is usually enough to dismiss a wrong one without reading the sentence twice.
English only. Passive voice is not an error, either — it is the right choice when the actor is unknown or irrelevant.
Common questions
Is passive voice bad?
No. It is the correct choice when the actor is unknown, obvious or irrelevant — "the servers were restarted overnight" is fine. It becomes a problem when it is used to avoid naming who did something.
Why does it show the rule that fired?
Because roughly one flagged sentence in five is not passive, and you can only tell which by seeing what the tool matched. A list of sentences with no reasoning makes you re-read every one.
Why was an obviously active sentence flagged?
Most likely a "to be" followed by an adjective that ends in -ed. Common ones are excluded, but the list cannot be complete. Dismiss it — that is what the rule column is for.
Is there a target percentage?
The 10% figure that circulates comes from a plugin default, not research. Read the flagged sentences and ask whether the missing actor matters; that answers the question better than a threshold.