Passive voice, explained.

Passive voice is the most argued-about, least understood habit in English writing. This page explains what it actually is, how to spot it in two seconds, why it creeps into drafts, and — importantly — when it is the right choice. It is the manual behind the Fixer.

What passive voice is

Every sentence with a transitive verb has three seats: a doer, an action, and a receiver. Active voice seats them in that order. Passive voice promotes the receiver to the front and demotes the doer — or drops them entirely:

Active: The board reviewed the report.
Passive: The report was reviewed (by the board).

The recipe is always the same:

The two-second test

If you can add “by zombies” right after the verb and the sentence still makes grammatical sense, it's passive:

• “The report was reviewed by zombies.” ✓ passive
• “The board reviewed by zombies the report.” ✗ active

A caution: not everything that looks like the recipe is passive. “She was tired” uses tired as an adjective — a state, not an action. That's why the Fixer marks such cases as possible rather than pretending certainty.

Why drafts fill up with it

• It feels safer. “Mistakes were made” assigns no blame. That's exactly why readers distrust it.
• It sounds formal. Many of us were taught that officialese equals professionalism. It mostly equals fog.
• The doer is genuinely unclear in early drafts — passive lets you postpone deciding who's responsible. Fine for drafting; fix it before shipping.

Before and after — from the ledger

Notice two recurring moves: name the doer (“we”, “the committee”), or — for instructions — switch to the imperative (“Submit your application”), which is the most active voice of all.

When passive is the right call

Passive voice is a tool, not a sin. Keep it when:

1. The doer is unknown. “My bike was stolen last night.” You'd name the thief if you could.
2. The doer is obvious or irrelevant. “The suspect was arrested.” Everyone knows the police did it; naming them adds nothing.
3. The receiver is the story. If a paragraph is about the cathedral, “the cathedral was completed in 1248” keeps the camera where the reader is looking.
4. Process and science writing. “The sample was heated to 90 °C.” Lab convention prefers the procedure over the technician — most journals accept either, but the passive here is idiomatic, not evasive.
5. Deliberate diplomacy. “The invoice hasn't been paid yet” can open a negotiation more gently than “you haven't paid.” Use sparingly — readers can smell it.

How the Fixer decides

Transparency is house policy, so here is the whole trick — no server, just rules in your browser:

• It splits your text into sentences (it knows about “Dr.”, “e.g.”, decimals, and quotes).
• It looks for the recipe: be/get + optional adverbs + past participle, using a list of ~180 irregular participles plus an -ed heuristic.
• Constructions that often describe states (tired, interested, closed, married …) are marked possible instead of passive — unless a “by …” phrase proves an agent, which upgrades the verdict.
• Words that merely end in -ed (sacred, wicked, talented) and verbs that can't take a passive (come, fallen, happened) are excluded.
• When it can see the doer, it drafts the flip for you. The suggestions are starters, not gospel — you're the writer.
• German texts are detected automatically and checked by a separate German engine (Beta) — werden-Passiv and Zustandspassiv. There's a full German version of the desk.

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