Passive Voice: How to Find It and When to Keep It

Writstack Guides  ·  Last updated July 26, 2026

Passive voice is the most flagged, least understood issue in writing feedback. Every style guide warns against it, most writers can't reliably spot it, and the standard advice — "never use it" — is wrong anyway. The real skill is knowing what passive voice does to a sentence, finding it fast, and deciding case by case whether it stays.

This guide covers how to identify passive constructions, why they weaken most web writing, the situations where passive voice is genuinely the right call, and a repeatable process for cleaning it out of a draft.

What passive voice actually is

In an active sentence, the subject performs the action: "The team shipped the feature." In a passive sentence, the subject receives it: "The feature was shipped by the team." The recipe for passive voice is always the same: a form of to be (is, was, were, been, being) plus a past participle (shipped, written, reviewed, made).

Two clarifications that fix most confusion. First, "was" alone doesn't make a sentence passive — "The launch was successful" is active; there's no action being received. Second, the quick field test: if you can append "by zombies" and the sentence still works grammatically, it's passive. "The report was reviewed" — by zombies — passive. "She reviewed the report" — by zombies — broken, so active.

What passive voice costs you

Length

Passive constructions run two to four words longer than their active equivalents, every time, structurally. "Mistakes were made by the marketing department" is seven words; "Marketing made mistakes" is three. Across a 1,500-word article, habitual passive voice adds a hundred words of pure overhead — words that cost reading effort and buy nothing.

Clarity about who did what

Passive voice lets the actor vanish. "The decision was made to cut the budget" — by whom? Sometimes that vagueness is accidental sloppiness. Sometimes it's deliberate evasion, which is why passive voice dominates corporate apologies and political statements. Either way, readers register the missing actor as a small unanswered question, and unanswered questions accumulate into distrust.

Momentum

Active sentences move: someone does something. Passive sentences sit: something is done. Web readers deciding every few seconds whether to continue feel that difference even when they can't name it. Drafts heavy with passive voice read as sluggish for a mechanical reason, not a mystical one.

When passive voice is the right choice

The "never use passive" rule fails because passive voice has legitimate jobs. Keep it when:

• The recipient is the story. "The CEO was fired last night" is correct — the firing matters, the board doing it is secondary. Making it active ("The board fired the CEO") changes the emphasis to the wrong place.
• The actor is unknown or irrelevant. "The site was attacked overnight" works fine when you don't know who attacked it. Forcing active voice invents an actor: "Someone attacked the site" — technically active, no clearer.
• Scientific and process writing conventions apply. "The sample was heated to 90 degrees" is standard method-section style, because the process matters and the technician doesn't.
• Sentence flow demands it. Occasionally, keeping the topic of a paragraph in the subject position across sentences reads better even at the cost of one passive construction. Flow beats rules.

The target for web content isn't zero. It's under 10% of sentences, with every remaining passive being a choice rather than an accident.

A repeatable cleanup process

1. Draft without policing yourself. Monitoring grammar while composing slows both. Get the ideas down.
2. Run a detector on the finished draft. Highlighting every passive construction at once shows you the pattern — most writers discover their passives cluster in specific spots, usually openings of paragraphs and anywhere they're describing decisions.
3. For each flagged sentence, ask: who's doing this? If naming the actor makes the sentence better, rewrite active: find the doer, make it the subject, use a real verb. "Improvements were made to the checkout flow" becomes "We rebuilt the checkout flow."
4. If naming the actor makes it worse, keep the passive — deliberately, and move on. A kept passive you chose is fine. Ten passives you didn't notice are the problem.

The deeper fix: weak verbs, not just voice

Passive voice is usually a symptom of a broader habit: leaning on to be verbs instead of action verbs. Even fully active sentences built on "is" and "there are" share the same flatness — "There are three factors that affect rankings" versus "Three factors affect rankings." When you do a passive-voice pass, scan for limp is/are constructions too. The strongest editing question isn't "is this passive?" but "what's the real verb in this sentence, and is it doing the work?" Fix the verbs and the voice mostly fixes itself.

Before and after: five rewrites worked through

Rules are easier to apply after watching them work. Five passives of the kind that show up in real business and blog writing, with the reasoning for each fix:

1. The vanished decision-maker

Before: "It was decided that the feature would be postponed."
After: "We postponed the feature."
Ten words to four. The original hides the decider twice over — "it was decided" and "would be postponed" are both passive. If your team made the call, saying so reads as ownership; hiding it reads as embarrassment.

2. The process description

Before: "Submissions are reviewed by our editors within 48 hours."
After: "Our editors review submissions within 48 hours."
A close call — the original isn't terrible, because submissions are the reader's concern. But the active version is shorter and leads with the humans doing the work, which is warmer for customer-facing copy. Either survives an edit; the active one wins on points.

3. The defensible keep

Before: "The vulnerability was discovered on March 3rd."
Keep it. Who discovered it may be unknown, confidential, or beside the point; the discovery and the date are the story. Forcing active voice ("A researcher discovered...") adds an actor nobody asked about. This is what a chosen passive looks like.

4. The double passive

Before: "Mistakes were made and lessons have been learned."
After: "We made mistakes and learned from them."
The classic accountability dodge, so recognizable it's become a joke. If the sentence exists to take responsibility, passive voice cancels its own purpose.

5. The buried finding

Before: "A 23% increase in click-through rate was observed when numbers were included in headlines."
After: "Headlines with numbers earned 23% more clicks."
Fifteen words to seven, and the finding — the thing the reader came for — moves from the grammatical basement to the front of the sentence. Research summaries are where this rewrite pays off most.

The one-sentence version

Find every passive construction, keep only the ones you can defend, and aim for under one sentence in ten.