Passive Voice Detector

In short Passive voice is when the thing being acted on becomes the subject — "the file was deleted" rather than "someone deleted the file" — and the tell is a form of "to be" with a past participle, often followed by "by". It is not an error, and the advice to eliminate it is one of the most confidently repeated pieces of bad writing advice there is. Passive is the correct choice whenever the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately not the point: "the samples were incubated for an hour" is right in a method section, and naming the technician would be noise. Where it goes wrong is when it hides an actor who matters. "Mistakes were made" is passive doing real work — evading responsibility — and "your account has been suspended" leaves the reader with no idea who to appeal to. So treat every flag as a prompt to check rather than an instruction to change: ask whether the actor is missing on purpose. If the answer is no, rewrite it. If the answer is yes, leave it.