Passive Voice

What It Does

Identifies passive voice constructions — sentences where the subject receives the action instead of performing it. Uses NLP to distinguish genuine passive constructions from predicate adjectives ("was tired") that merely look passive.

Why It Matters

Passive voice distances the reader from the action and often hides the actor:

• Passive: "The ball was thrown across the field."
• Active: "Jake hurled the ball across the field."

Active voice is more direct, more engaging, and usually shorter. Passive voice isn't always wrong — it's useful when the actor is unknown or unimportant — but overuse dulls prose.

What Gets Flagged

Passive Constructions

Severity: Information

Example (flagged):

The letter had been written in haste.

Why: The actor is hidden. Who wrote it?

Suggested revision:

She scrawled the letter in haste.

Detected passive patterns:

Pattern	Example
was/were + past participle	"was thrown", "were seen"
has/had/have been + past participle	"had been written"
will/would/could be + past participle	"could be found"
get/got + past participle	"got broken"

Smart Filtering

The analyzer skips:

• Predicate adjectives — "was tired", "was excited", "was bored" (these describe state, not action)
• Dialogue lines — passive voice in speech is natural character voice
• Non-verb words — words ending in -ed that aren't actually verbs (e.g., "was sophisticated")

Configuration

No configuration options.

Technical Details

• Source: prose-craft
• Scope: Line-level (skips dialogue lines)
• Method: Regex pattern matching + NLP past-participle verification + predicate adjective exclusion list