The copy desk for active prose
Paste your draft below. Every passive construction is marked up like a galley proof — with a plain-English explanation and a rewrite starter for each catch.
Private by design: analysis runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded.
Paste or type something — the desk reads as you write.
Bring your own key. Your API key is stored only in this browser and sentences are sent directly from your browser to your provider account when you click “AI rewrite” on a finding. This site has no server: we never see your key or your text, and usage is billed to your account, not ours.
The engine scans every sentence for the passive recipe: a form of to be (or get) followed by a past participle — “was written”, “is being built”, “got broken”. It knows about 180 irregular participles and the adverbs writers wedge in between.
Solid red marks mean passive voice. Dashed ochre marks mean possible — constructions like “was tired” that usually describe a state, not an action. A blue underline points at the hidden doer when a “by …” phrase gives them away.
Each finding comes with a rewrite starter. When the sentence names its doer — “was reviewed by the board” — the desk flips it for you: “The board reviewed …”. You stay the writer; the desk stays the desk.
Passive voice isn't a grammar error — it's a camera angle. It points the lens at what received the action and quietly walks the doer out of the frame. Used deliberately, that's a fine choice. Used by default, it makes writing foggy, wordy, and strangely unaccountable:
“Mistakes were made.” — by whom?
“We made mistakes.” — ah. There you are.
Business writing, documentation, and marketing copy all get faster and more trustworthy when someone in the sentence does the thing. This desk exists to make that edit take seconds instead of a style-guide argument. When passive is the right call — and sometimes it is — the guide explains when to keep it.
No. The checker is plain JavaScript running in your browser tab. There is no server-side processing, no account, and no analytics script watching you type. Your draft is kept in your browser's local storage only, so it's still there if you come back — hit Clear to remove it.
No — and this tool never claims that. Passive voice is right when the doer is unknown, irrelevant, or when the receiver is the story (“The suspect was arrested”). The tool marks constructions so you can decide; the guide covers the five cases where passive earns its place.
English overloads the passive recipe. “The store was closed” can be an action (someone closed it) or a state (it just… was closed). Words like tired, interested, married, closed get a dashed “possible” mark instead of a hard verdict — unless a “by …” phrase settles the question.
Optional and strictly bring-your-own-key: you paste your own Anthropic or OpenAI API key (stored only in your browser), and when you click “AI rewrite” on a finding, that sentence goes directly from your browser to your provider account. We never see your key or your text, and usage is billed to you — this site has no server and pays for nothing on your behalf. The rule-based desk works fully without it.
It's a rule-based proofreader, not an oracle. It catches the be/get + participle patterns that make up the overwhelming majority of real-world passives, and it errs on the side of honesty with its two-tier marking. It will occasionally miss an exotic construction or flag an adjective — you get the final say, as it should be.