Free Passive Voice Checker

For much of the twentieth century, scientific prose was written almost entirely in the passive voice. The convention had a logic: suppressing the researcher was meant to signal objectivity, so "we heated the sample" became "the sample was heated" and the person behind the experiment disappeared from the page. Generations of students were taught that this was simply how academic writing sounds.

That consensus has reversed. The APA Publication Manual advises authors to prefer active voice, and the author guidelines of major journals, Nature and Science among them, encourage it explicitly. The reasons are about clarity rather than fashion. Active sentences are shorter. They name who did what, which matters when a reviewer needs to evaluate a claim: "it was decided to exclude three outliers" conceals the decision-maker and the rationale, while "we excluded three outliers because their reaction times fell below the attention threshold" can be assessed on its merits. Across a full manuscript, habitual passives also add thousands of words of scaffolding that carry no meaning.

None of this makes the passive wrong. It remains the right choice when the actor is unknown, irrelevant or obvious, and it is the settled convention of methods sections, where readers care about the procedure, not the person pipetting. "Participants were randomly assigned to conditions" needs no author. Passive voice also lets you keep a paragraph's topic in the subject position, which sometimes reads more smoothly than forcing the actor to the front. The skill is not avoiding the passive but choosing it, sentence by sentence, for a reason.

That is what this checker is for. It shows you every passive construction and how much of your draft depends on them, so the deliberate ones stay and the habitual ones get rewritten. For the broader craft of tightening academic prose, see our guides on improving your academic writing style and why general readability editors mislead researchers.