Limato
Passive Voice Checker
Every passive construction in your text, highlighted as you type — plus the share of your sentences that are passive. Free, no signup.
Detection is a pattern match (a form of be or get, optionally an adverb, then a past participle) running in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere. It deliberately skips participial adjectives like "is interested" or "was born", so a rare participle can slip through. Not every highlight is a problem: see when the passive is the right choice, below.
How to use the passive voice checker
Paste up to 750 words. The scan runs in your browser as you type: each passive construction is highlighted, and you get two numbers — how many there are, and what share of your sentences contain one. Nothing is sent anywhere for that part.
Click Make it active and the text is rewritten in Limato's Simplify tone: short, direct sentences in plain English. In practice that turns most passives around, because naming the actor is shorter than hiding them. It is a rewrite, not a mechanical voice transformation, so read the result — and keep the passives you meant to write.
What the passive voice actually is
Two ingredients, always: a form of be (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being — or get in informal English) plus a past participle (written, sent, made, fixed, chosen).
- Active: Ana wrote the report. — subject does the verb.
- Passive: The report was written by Ana. — subject receives it.
- Agentless passive: The report was written. — the doer disappears entirely.
That third form is the one that causes trouble. English lets you delete the actor, and once the option exists, writers take it — which is exactly why "mistakes were made" became the standard joke about political apologies.
Two things that look passive and are not: was going (past continuous, be + -ing, not a past participle) and is interested (be + a participial adjective describing a state, not an action done to the subject). This checker skips a short list of those.
Passive to active: worked examples
The recipe: find the real actor, put them in front of the verb, drop the be, and un-participle the verb. If no actor is named, you have to supply one — which is the point.
- The decision was made by the board. → The board decided. (7 words to 3)
- Your request has been received. → We got your request.
- The bug was fixed yesterday. → Ana fixed the bug yesterday. (the rewrite forces you to say who)
- It was agreed that the deadline would be moved. → We agreed to move the deadline. (9 words to 6)
- The files are being reviewed by the team. → The team is reviewing the files.
- Mistakes were made. → I got it wrong.
- You are requested to confirm by Friday. → Please confirm by Friday.
Note what happens to length. Active sentences run shorter almost every time, which is why a passive-heavy draft also reads as a long one.
When the passive is the right choice
The passive is not an error and any advice that treats it as one is wrong. Keep it when:
- The actor is unknown or irrelevant. "The server was restarted at 03:00." Nobody cares which engineer.
- The result matters more than the doer. "The samples were incubated for 24 hours." This is why scientific method sections have traditionally been written in the passive — the convention exists so the procedure, not the researcher, holds the subject position.
- You are keeping a topic in the subject slot. "The prototype shipped in March. It was redesigned twice before launch." Going active would drag a new subject in and break the thread.
- Naming the actor would be tactless. "An error was introduced in the last release" is a kinder Monday-morning sentence than naming the colleague.
- The convention demands it. Legal, regulatory and formal institutional writing use it deliberately.
The rule of thumb: passive by choice is fine, passive by habit is not. If you cannot say why a sentence is passive, make it active.
Why non-native writers produce more passives
Every language has an impersonal construction, and English is one of the few where the default translation of it lands in the passive. That is the mechanism behind most of the over-production we see:
- Spanish and Italian: se constructions. "Se envió el informe" / "Si è deciso" are the neutral way to report an action with no named actor. The word-for-word English — "the report was sent", "it was decided" — is passive, while the natural English is "we sent the report", "we decided". Note that Spanish itself prefers the pasiva refleja to the pasiva perifrástica; "fue enviado" sounds heavy in Spanish too. English feels the same way about "was sent".
- German: man plus the very common werden passive. "Man hat entschieden" becomes "it was decided" rather than "we decided".
- Russian and Polish: impersonal third-person plural ("сообщили", "решили") with no stated subject. English has no equivalent, so it comes out passive.
- French: on — "on a décidé" — has no clean English counterpart either. The passive is the reflex; "we decided" is the fix.
- Academic training. If your English writing was learned through university papers, the passive was taught as the mark of objectivity. It reads as evasive in an email.
Two errors worth naming separately, because a grammar checker will not always catch them: "was borned" (born is already the participle — "was born") and "is consist of" (consist has no passive at all — "consists of").
What this checker catches, and what it misses
Being honest about a heuristic is more useful than pretending it is a parser:
- It catches be and get followed by a past participle, including forms split by an adverb ("was clearly explained"), across tenses: is sent, was sent, has been sent, will be sent, is being sent, got sent.
- It deliberately ignores a list of participial adjectives — is interested, was born, is tired, was married, is used to — because flagging those produces more noise than signal.
- It can miss a rare irregular participle that is not on its list, and it does not resolve genuinely ambiguous cases ("the door was closed" is either an action or a state, and only you know which).
- It never judges. A high percentage in a lab report is correct; the same number in a cover letter is not.
Everything above runs locally. Only the rewrite button sends text to the API, and that text is processed and returned, never stored.
The other things that make writing indirect
Passive voice usually travels with company. If the draft still feels heavy after fixing it, check:
- Nominalizations — verbs turned into nouns. "We made a decision regarding the implementation" is active and still terrible; "we decided how to build it" is the fix.
- Padding adverbs and intensifiers. The adverb checker highlights those.
- Sentence length. The readability checker gives you the average and a grade level.
- Broken sentences. The sentence fragment checker catches clauses left standing alone; the punctuation checker handles run-ons and commas.
- Plain grammar and spelling. The grammar checker fixes those with your wording intact.
Spanish speakers learning the English passive have a dedicated page: voz pasiva en inglés.
Fix it anywhere you write
Limato's Chrome extension rewrites and corrects text inline on any website — Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn, Notion. Highlight, fix, paste back. 20 free rewrites a day.
Add to Chrome — FreeFrequently asked questions
What is a passive voice checker?
A tool that finds sentences where the subject receives the action instead of doing it — a form of be or get plus a past participle, as in "the report was written". This one highlights them in your browser as you type, reports how many there are and what share of your sentences contain one, and can rewrite the draft in direct, active English.
How do I identify passive voice?
Look for a form of be (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) or get followed by a past participle, then try adding "by zombies" after the verb. If "the report was written by zombies" makes grammatical sense, the sentence is passive. Note that be + -ing ("was going") is not passive, and neither is be + an adjective ("is interested").
Is passive voice wrong?
No. It is the right choice when the actor is unknown or irrelevant ("the server was restarted at 03:00"), when the result matters more than the doer (scientific method sections), when you are keeping one topic as the subject across sentences, or when naming the person would be tactless. Passive by choice is fine; passive by habit is not.
What percentage of passive voice is acceptable?
There is no official number, and any tool quoting one exactly is inventing it. What the percentage is good for is comparing drafts — fix the passives you did not intend and watch it fall. A method section in a paper can be mostly passive and still be correct; a cover letter at the same rate reads as evasive.
Why do non-native speakers use more passive voice?
Because the impersonal construction of their first language translates into it. Spanish and Italian "se", German "man" plus werden, French "on", Russian impersonal third-person plural — all of them describe an action with no named actor, and the literal English is passive. "Se envió el informe" becomes "the report was sent" when the natural English is "we sent the report". Academic training reinforces the habit.
Does the rewrite guarantee active voice?
No, and no honest tool can. Clicking Make it active runs Limato's Simplify tone — short, direct sentences in plain English — which turns around most passives because naming the actor is shorter than hiding them. Where the passive is genuinely the better sentence, it may stay. Read the result.