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Passive voice detector

Find passive-voice sentences in your text and see who or what performed the action.

Input
25
Output
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Passive voice detector
Paste an article, email or essay and this tool scans every sentence for passive voice — constructions like "the report was written" instead of "she wrote the report." Each passive sentence is marked, and the part of the sentence that names who or what actually did the action is called out too, so you can see at a glance which sentences hide their agent entirely.
Pick the text language first: English, Slovak, Czech and German each get their own grammar rules, since passive voice is built differently in each — an auxiliary verb plus a participle in English and German, or an adjectival participle (and, in Slovak and Czech, an optional reflexive construction with "sa" or "se") in the Slavic pair. Turn on reflexive passive to also count sentences like "kniha sa číta," and turn on indefinite subjects and verbal nouns to flag related weak-writing patterns — vague subjects like "it" or "man," and nominalizations like "implementation" that hide a verb inside a noun. The threshold sets how high the passive-sentence share can climb before the tool flags it as worth revising; below it, passive sentences are still shown but not treated as a problem.
Choose whether the output is a plain list of only the passive sentences — each with its agent marked, or a dash if none is stated — or the full text with every sentence shown and the passive ones highlighted in place. The live tally below the output reports total sentences, how many are passive and the percentage, updating as you type or adjust an option.
Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere. When you're done, copy the result, download it as a .txt file, or send it straight into another tool to keep editing.
FAQ
How does it decide which part of the sentence is the agent?
It looks for the "by" phrase in English ("by the author"), "von" in German, or "od" in Slovak/Czech, right after the passive verb. When no such phrase is present, the agent is marked as not stated — which is often the real problem with a passive sentence.
Why does it sometimes miss a passive sentence, or flag one that isn't?
Detection is heuristic, based on common auxiliary verbs and participle patterns rather than full grammatical parsing. It handles everyday writing well but can miss unusual phrasing or occasionally flag an adjective that happens to look like a participle.
What does the passive-share threshold do?
It sets the percentage of passive sentences above which the tool treats the result as worth revising. Below the threshold, passive sentences are still shown but not flagged as a problem.
What is reflexive passive, and why is it off by default?
In Slovak and Czech, a verb plus "sa"/"se" can express passive meaning without any form of "to be," like "kniha sa číta" ("the book is read"). It is off by default because the same construction is also used for ordinary reflexive verbs that have nothing to do with passive voice.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The detector runs entirely in your browser using plain JavaScript — your text is never sent to a server.
Further reading