Passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a sentence is the recipient of an action rather than its agent. “The letter was written” instead of “The secretary wrote the letter.” In writing guides, passive voice has a bad reputation: it tends to appear on the same list as clichés and filler words, as something to be eliminated. That is an oversimplification. Passive voice is not a mistake. It is a tool that weakens prose in some sentences and is the best possible choice in others.
This article shows how to recognise passive voice in English, when it genuinely hurts, when it is worth keeping, and how during editing to decide which sentences to rewrite.
How to recognise the passive voice
In English, the passive voice is formed with a form of the verb “be” (or sometimes “get”) followed by a past participle.
- “The door was opened.” (passive: be + past participle)
- “The house was surrounded by a high wall.” (passive: be + past participle)
- “He closed the door.” (active: the agent acts directly)
The agent can be added with “by”: “The letter was written by the secretary.” It can also be omitted entirely, and that omission is the source of both the weaknesses and the strengths of the construction.
One related question worth knowing during editing: the difference between a true passive and a stative description. “The door was opened” is passive, reporting an event. “The door was open” or “The door was closed” describes a state rather than an action. Both look similar, but only the first one removes an agent. When revising, ask whether a sentence reports something happening or simply describes how something is. A stative description is fine; an overused passive event often isn’t.
When passive voice hurts
Passive voice weakens prose in three ways, and all of them come down to the same thing: the construction pushes the agent aside.
First, the agent disappears. “The room was searched” doesn’t say who searched it. In prose that is meant to keep the reader anchored to a specific character, you lose both information and energy in one stroke.
The sentence also grows longer. One active verb splits into an auxiliary and a past participle: “searched the room” becomes “the room was searched.” And a shorter sentence almost always hits harder.
Finally, distance creeps in. Passive voice reads like a report of an event rather than the event itself. In a police report, that is a virtue. In a scene the reader is meant to live through, it becomes a problem.
This is most visible in action scenes. Compare:
The door was forced open, the room was searched. The suitcase was found under the bed.
He forced the door open, searched the room, and pulled the suitcase out from under the bed.
The second version is shorter, faster, and keeps the reader with the character. In a scene meant to drive pace, passive voice almost always works against you.
When passive voice is the right choice
Removing the agent is sometimes exactly what you need.
The simplest case: the agent is unknown. “The village had been burned before dawn” works better than inventing a perpetrator the narrator doesn’t actually know.
More often you hide the agent deliberately. In crime fiction and thrillers, passive voice lets you show the effect and withhold the cause. “The lock had been opened from the inside” builds tension precisely because it doesn’t say who opened it.
Sometimes the object matters more than whoever acted. When a scene belongs to the victim, “she was shoved against the wall” keeps the reader with her rather than with the attacker.
There is also a less obvious use: passive voice can characterise a speaker. A character who talks in bureaucratic, impersonal language (“a decision will be made in due course”) reveals something about themselves through sentence construction alone.
| Goal in the scene | Better choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Action scene, momentum | active | agent drives the pace |
| Agent unknown | passive | no need to invent a perpetrator |
| Agent deliberately hidden | passive | absence of agent builds tension |
| Object is victim and centre of scene | passive | keeps reader with the object |
| Character voice (formal register) | passive | passivity conveys how they speak |
| Default narration | active | shorter, more concrete sentences |
How to edit the passive voice: five steps
Passive voice is work for the sentence-polishing stage, one of the last passes in revision. Don’t touch it until you are sure a given scene is actually staying in the book.
- Find the passive constructions. Look for forms of “was”, “were”, “had been”, “is”, “are” followed by a past participle.
- For each one, ask who performs the action. If you can’t say, the sentence is hiding the agent. That is not always a mistake, but it is always a decision.
- Decide whether the agent matters. If the agent is known and important to the scene, rewrite the sentence in active voice.
- Keep the passive where it earns its place. Agent unknown, deliberately hidden, or irrelevant; object at the centre of attention; character register: in these cases passive is a conscious choice.
- Check the density of the scene. Action scenes should be almost entirely active. Reflective and descriptive scenes will tolerate more passive without damage.
The full sequence of self-editing stages, from structure to sentence polish, is covered in the guide on how to edit a novel.
Passive-voice density: numbers instead of instinct
There is no threshold at which passive voice becomes a mistake. There is, however, a perceptible proportion: if a chase scene is passive one sentence in three, the reader will feel that something is slowing down, even without naming the reason. The problem is that in your own text you don’t see that proportion. Your eye slides over constructions you wrote yourself.
This is where measurement helps. Vellam’s static analysis has a dedicated layer for passive voice: it marks every passive sentence in the text and shows its density chapter by chapter. You get not a verdict but a map, which shows where the passive voice clusters. The decision about what to rewrite and what to keep is yours, scene by scene. You can see sample analyses on excerpts from a real novel.
Passive voice is just one layer of sentence polish. How the full editing stage fits together, and where the limits of an author working on their own text begin, is covered in the guide on how to write a novel.
Frequently asked questions
Is passive voice a mistake in fiction?
No. Passive voice is a correct grammatical construction and is sometimes the best choice when the agent is unknown, deliberately hidden, or irrelevant. The mistake is using it reflexively where active voice would be shorter and stronger, especially in action scenes.
How do I recognise passive voice in an English sentence?
Passive voice in English is a form of “be” (or “get”) followed by a past participle. Examples: “the door was opened”, “the letter had been written”, “the house was surrounded”. The agent can be added with “by”, or omitted entirely.
How much passive voice is acceptable in a novel?
There is no single number. What matters more than an overall percentage is distribution: action scenes should be almost entirely active, while descriptive and reflective scenes can carry more passive without harm. If a dynamic scene is heavily passive, that is a signal to rewrite, regardless of the average across the whole text.
What is the difference between “the door was opened” and “the door was open”?
“The door was opened” is a passive event: something happened, an agent acted, and that agent may be hidden. “The door was open” or “the door was closed” describes a state, not an event. Stative descriptions are not passive constructions, so they don’t carry the same cost. When editing, it helps to ask whether the sentence reports an action or describes a condition.