Active and passive voice: examples, how to spot each, and when passive is fine

In the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action: “The editor checked the article.” In the passive voice, the subject is what the action is done to: “The article was checked by the editor.” Passive voice is not a grammar mistake. It is a choice, and it is usually the wrong one only when it hides who did what. Below are active and passive voice examples in every common tense, three ways to spot a passive sentence, the cases where passive is the better choice, and five steps to rewrite one.

If you have a draft to check, paste it into the free readability checker. It highlights each sentence that looks passive, so you can decide one by one whether to keep it. Treat a highlight as a question, not a verdict. Some passives are the best way to say the thing.

The 13% and 20% figures are an older count (Bryant, 1962, via Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage) quoted by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum. His own stricter count finds about 17% in random prose and 26% in Orwell’s essay^[9]. Those figures count transitive verbs, while Yoast counts sentences, so the two are not directly comparable^[11]. The zero is our own reading of four documents, listed in the section on AI answers below.

Active and passive voice, defined

Google’s technical writing course puts it as two formulas. An active sentence is actor + verb + target. A passive sentence reverses it: target + verb + actor. Its example turns “The cat sat on the mat” into “The mat was sat on by the cat.” Cut the last three words and you get “The mat was sat on.” Who sat on it? As the course says, “Readers can only guess”^[3].

Linguists split passives in two. Geoffrey Pullum calls a passive with a by phrase a long passive, and one without it a short passive^[9]. Short passives cause most of the trouble, because they let a sentence leave out who acted.

Active and passive voice examples

Start with simple pairs. In each one, the active version puts the doer first. The passive version starts with the thing acted on. The third column is the same passive with the doer removed. That is legal and common, and it is where meaning goes missing.

Style guides use the same kind of pairs. The plain language guidelines give these three^[4]:

• “The company polluted the lake” (active) and “The lake was polluted by the company” (passive).
• “We proposed new regulations” (active) and “New regulations were proposed” (passive, doer dropped).
• “You must include the following information in your application” (active) and “The following information must be included in the application for it to be considered complete” (passive, and twice as long).

Purdue’s writing lab has a pair that shows why people reach for the passive. “Your bicycle has been damaged” is passive. “I have damaged your bicycle” is active^[5]. Only one of them admits who did it.

Passive voice examples in every tense

The passive is built the same way in every tense. Put be in the tense you need, then add the past participle of the main verb. Here is one sentence run through each tense.

Read down the last column. The form of be carries the tense. The participle, checked, never changes. And the doer moves to the end, after by, where it can be cut. We leave out the perfect continuous tenses (“has been checking”). Their passive forms, such as “has been being checked”, are so awkward that a rewrite is nearly always better.

Many common verbs have irregular participles, so a passive verb does not always end in ed: written, sent, known, made, taken, given, sold, built. Google’s course lists sat, known and frozen as examples^[3]. “The report was written by Sam” and “The parcel was sent yesterday” are both passive.

Examples by type of writing

Whether to keep a passive depends on the job the sentence does. The same rule applies everywhere: rewrite when the reader needs to know who acts, and keep it when they don’t.

How to spot passive voice

Three checks, from the most exact to the quickest.

1. Look for be plus a past participle

The plain language guidelines say passive sentences often have two features: “A form of the verb ‘to be,’ such as ‘are,’ ‘was,’ ‘were,’ ‘could be,’ or ‘have been’”, and “A past participle (generally with ‘-ed’ on the end)”^[4]. Google’s course adds a clue. When the sentence names the actor, a preposition usually follows the verb, often by: “is generated by”, “was formed by”^[3].

2. Try the zombie test

A memorable trick, popularised by Rebecca Johnson of Marine Corps University: add “by zombies” after the verb. If the sentence still makes sense, it is passive^[8]. “The letter was sent (by zombies)” works, so it is passive. “She was feeling (by zombies) tired” does not, so it is not^[8]. “The window broke (by zombies)” fails too. That sentence has no doer, yet it is active, because broke has no object and no be.

The test is not foolproof. Mental Floss points to verbs with two objects. In “XYZ Corp was awarded a prize”, the zombies don’t fit right after the verb, because the prize is in the way. Put them at the end instead: “XYZ Corp was awarded a prize by zombies”^[8].

3. Ask who did it

If the subject is the thing acted on, and the doer comes after by or not at all, the sentence is passive. Purdue describes the passive as a way to “postpone mentioning the agent until the last part of the sentence or to avoid mentioning the agent at all”^[6].

What is not passive

Most false alarms come from treating every was or were as passive. These are not:

• Past tense. “The company polluted the lake” is past and active^[4].
• Be plus an adjective. “The butler was dead” is not a passive, Pullum points out, though “The butler was murdered” is^[9].
• There was, there were. William Strunk called “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” passive. It isn’t. As Mental Floss puts it, “Nothing is done to the leaves”^[8].
• Commands. “Click the Submit button” names no actor, but Google’s course notes that sentences starting with an imperative verb are typically active. The implied actor is you^[3].

And two that are passive, or may be, but slip past the usual checks. Get passives such as “He got fired” have no be at all. Pullum quotes examples from the Wall Street Journal, such as “A man got clobbered with a steel chair”^[9]. And “The door was locked” is ambiguous. Pullum notes it can describe an action (someone locked it) or a state (it was in its locked state)^[9].

When passive voice is the right choice

Style guides that prefer active voice still list exceptions. Microsoft says “Keep it active whenever you can”^[1]. Google says “In certain cases, it’s okay to use passive voice”^[2]. These are the cases they name.

• The doer is unknown. “My bike was stolen.” Purdue says the passive makes sense when the agent is “obvious, unimportant, or unknown”^[6].
• The doer is obvious or beside the point. Purdue’s example: “A new experimental liver-transplant operation was performed successfully yesterday.” The operation matters more than who did it^[6]. Google’s is “The database was purged in January”, for when “your readers don’t need to know who’s responsible for the action”^[2].
• The focus belongs on what was acted on. Google lists “To emphasize an object over an action”^[2]. Microsoft lists “Emphasizing the receiver of the action”^[1].
• Naming the doer would blame the reader. Microsoft uses the passive for “Avoiding condescending text or blaming the customer, especially in errors, warnings, or notifications”. Its example is “That site can’t be found”^[1].
• A rule acts, not a person. The plain language guidelines allow the passive “when one action follows another as a matter of law, and there is no actor (besides the law itself) for the second action”^[4].
• Flow. Keeping the same topic at the start of each sentence can make a paragraph easier to follow: “Our new office opened in March. It was designed by a local firm.” That is our example of Purdue’s point about putting the agent last^[6].

Scientific and academic writing

This is where the advice has moved. Purdue notes that “writers in the sciences conventionally use passive voice more often than writers in other discourses”^[6]. But Nature’s guide for authors now says: “Using the active voice (‘we performed the experiment...’) typically helps readers better understand concepts and results described in a paper”^[10]. Google’s course is blunter. Does the passive voice make research more objective? “No. Many scientific journals have embraced active voice”^[3]. If you write for a class or a journal, its style guide wins. Ask, or look at a recent paper it published.

When passive voice hurts

The real problem is rarely the passive itself. It is the missing doer. The plain language guidelines say it plainly: “Passive voice obscures who handles what and is one of the biggest problems with government writing.” Their fix: “Not ‘It must be done,’ but ‘You must do it.’”^[4]

Pullum, a linguist who defends the passive, draws the same line from the other side. He argues that the stylistic charges against the passive “are entirely baseless”, and that some critics “confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility”^[9]. In plain words: hiding who is responsible is the fault. The passive is just one way to do it. Three signs a passive should go:

• The reader has to act. When a passive leaves out the actor, Google warns, “it’s often hard for readers to figure out who’s supposed to do something”^[2].
• Someone is dodging. “Mistakes were made” names nobody. “We made mistakes” owns them.
• The sentence is long. Purdue: active sentences are “more concise than those in passive voice because fewer words are required to express action”^[5].

How to change passive voice to active

Purdue’s method is short: find the agent, then “Make that agent the subject of the sentence, and change the verb accordingly”^[7]. In five steps:

Sources for the first two rows: Google’s style guide^[2] and the plain language guidelines^[4].

Does voice matter for SEO and AI answers?

Start with what is not known. No search engine or AI company publishes a rule about active or passive voice. On 2 October 2026 we read Google’s guide to AI features^[12], its helpful content guidance^[13], Microsoft’s guidance on AI search answers^[14] and OpenAI’s publisher FAQ^[15]. None of them mentions voice. Google says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”^[12].

What they do talk about is clarity. Google’s guidance asks whether content has “any spelling or stylistic issues”, and gives “clear writing” as an example of the skill its quality raters are trained to look for^[13]. Microsoft’s post, written by a Bing product manager, says AI systems “can lift a single line” from a page. It asks for “Self-contained phrasing: Sentences that make sense even when pulled out of context”^[14].

The next part is our reasoning, not a vendor’s. A sentence quoted alone loses its neighbours. “It was launched in 2024” means nothing out of context: what was launched, and by whom? “Acme launched the app in 2024” carries its meaning with it. Notice that the fix is naming things, not the voice. “The app was launched by Acme in 2024” is passive, and it quotes just as well. So for web pages the useful rule is this: every sentence you want quoted should name its subject and its doer. Active voice is simply the easiest habit that gets you there.

SEO plugins add their own rules. Yoast’s readability check turns green when under 10% of sentences are passive and red above 15%, and Yoast itself says “Rules about style are hardly ever set in stone”^[11]. That is a plugin’s rule of thumb, not a ranking factor. Readability scores work the same way, and our Flesch-Kincaid guide covers what those numbers can and cannot tell you. For signals a machine can actually read, see E-E-A-T when the reader is a machine. For how engines pick their sources, see how AI assistants choose what to cite, and for the wider approach, the answer engine optimization guide.

Checking a whole site

Voice is a sentence-level choice, so it is best checked while you write. Across a whole site, a more useful question is whether each page opens with a short answer right under its main heading. CoreCited’s GEO Audit checks that on every page it crawls. It does not grade voice. The free account audits 10 pages, and every limit is on the pricing page.

Questions people ask

Sources