What counts as passive voice?

Passive voice is when the subject receives the action instead of performing it, formed by a 'to be' verb (is, was, were, been, being) plus a past participle, as in 'the form was submitted'. The active equivalent puts the actor first: 'you submitted the form'.

Is passive voice always wrong?

No. Passive voice is fine when the actor is unknown or irrelevant ('the road was resurfaced'). The goal of plain-language editing is to reduce unnecessary passives that hide who must act, which matters most in notices and instructions.

How does the detector work without a grammar API?

It tokenises each sentence, finds forms of 'to be', and checks whether a past participle follows within a short window, allowing adverbs and 'not' in between. Regular '-ed' participles plus a built-in list of irregular participles are matched.

Will it catch every passive and never misfire?

No rule-based detector is perfect. It can miss unusual constructions and occasionally flag an adjective that looks like a participle ('was tired'). Treat the highlights as prompts for human review, not a final verdict.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. All parsing and highlighting happen in your browser. The text never leaves your device, so you can safely check confidential notices, contracts, or internal drafts.

Passive Voice Highlighter

The Passive Voice Highlighter scans English prose for passive-voice constructions and marks each one inline. Passive voice — a form of to be followed by a past participle, as in “the application was reviewed” — often hides who is responsible for an action. Plain-language standards and many compliance frameworks ask public-facing notices to favour the active voice so readers know exactly who must do what. This tool finds the passives so you can rewrite them.

How it works

The highlighter applies a rule-based, sentence-by-sentence algorithm rather than a remote grammar service:

The text is split into sentences and each sentence is tokenised into words.
For every token it checks whether the word is a form of to be — is, am, are, was, were, be, been, being, get, got, gets (the last three catch the “get-passive” as in “got approved”).
It then looks ahead a few tokens, skipping adverbs and not, for a past participle. Regular participles ending in -ed are matched directly; an embedded list of common irregular participles (written, taken, given, made, sent, shown, held, kept, built, paid, and dozens more) covers the rest.
When a “to be” + participle pair is found, the whole span is highlighted, and any following by … agent phrase is marked so you can see the hidden actor.

Example and tips

Paste: “The form was submitted by the applicant and the decision will be made next week.” The tool highlights was submitted (with by the applicant as the agent) and be made.

To rewrite, move the actor to the front: “The applicant submitted the form, and we will make the decision next week.”
Keep a passive only when the actor is unknown or genuinely irrelevant.
A short sentence with no highlighted span is already active. Re-paste after editing to confirm your passive count has dropped to zero.