How do I stop writing in passive voice?

Passive voice has one of the worst reputations in writing advice. Everyone gives it as advice, all of us have been told to avoid it, but very few people understand the fundamentals of what it is. The result is a lot of misunderstanding and, new writers especially, avoiding the wrong things. 

Going against the conventional wisdom here, I’m going to come right out and say that “passive” is not a dirty word. Passive voice exists, it’s grammatically correct, and it’s not bad in and of itself. What we need to watch out for is its overuse, and the instinct to mistake past tense for passive. It’s not about whether passive voice is bad, it’s about whether it’s appropriate in the context you are using it in.

I’m going to need you to buckle in for this one, because it is going to be dense.

What is passive voice?

Passive voice is about who a sentence is focused on. In an active sentence, the person or thing doing the action (the agent) is the subject, e.g. "Maya found the letter". In a passive sentence, the thing the action happens to takes that spot instead, e.g.  "The letter was found by Maya.” Nothing about the event has changed, but the focus has moved from Maya to the letter.

Passive sentences are built from a form of "to be" (is, was, were, been, being) and a past participle, which is the form of the verb you'd use after "have" (found, written, taken, driven). The part that catches most writers off guard is when the agent of the sentence isn’t identified, e.g. "The letter was found" (it’s not clear who the active finder was in this sentence). These agentless passives are the ones that creep into drafts most often, and writers will tie themselves into knots trying to undo them, despite the fact that they are incredibly useful and often the most appropriate in their context (more on that later).

Is passive voice the same as past tense?

Voice is about who/what is doing the action, and tense is about when it happens. They're two separate things, so any combination is possible.

In each pair below, the first sentence is active and the second is passive:

• Present: Maya finds the letter. / The letter is found by Maya.
• Present perfect: Maya has found the letter. / The letter has been found by Maya.
• Past: Maya found the letter. / The letter was found by Maya.
• Past perfect: Maya had found the letter. / The letter had been found by Maya.
• Future: Maya will find the letter. / The letter will be found by Maya.
• Future perfect: Maya will have found the letter. / The letter will have been found by Maya

So why do the two get confused?

The first reason is the name. “Past participle” sounds like it must mean writing in the past tense, but it’s actually just the name for a particular verb form (found, written, taken). 

Look at the example of passive voice when writing in future tense: “The letter will be found by Maya.” Or the example of present perfect: “Maya has found the letter.” Both are about things that are connected with the present or the future, but use the past participle.

Perfect tense is also a big reason that people confuse passive voice and past tense. It comes from the Latin perfectus, meaning “completed”, and treats an action as complete from a particular point in time. Let’s look at each example to illustrate: 

• Present perfect: completed, and connected to now.
  “Maya has found the letter” means the finding is done, and the result matters at this moment.
• Past perfect: completed before a specific point in the past.
  “Maya had found the letter before midnight” means the finding was already done before midnight, which has itself already passed.
• Future perfect: will be completed before a specific point in the future.
  “Maya will have found the letter before midnight” means the finding will be done before midnight arrives.

We use them when we want to show the order of events, or that something is already finished by the time something else happens. All three are built the same way: a form of “have” plus a past participle. The helper verb tells you the tense: “has” is present, “had” is past, and “will have” is future.

This is where the confusion often starts. Perfect tenses are all about finished actions, so they feel like the past, and they use a past participle, so it’s easy to assume “past participle” means “past tense”. But it’s the helper verb doing the work of showing the tense, not the participle, which often makes the sentences feel passive, even if they're not.

If you’re ever not sure whether you’re looking at past tense or passive voice, ask two separate questions about any sentence. 

1. When is it happening? 
2. Is the subject of the sentence doing the action?

If your sentence is happening in the past, then it’s past tense. Then you determine the voice by seeing who the active subject of the sentence is. 

Why do we write in passive voice?

A lot of us were taught to write in a way that keeps us (the writer) distant from the page. Reports, essays, and academic writing reward a detached tone, and one of the easiest ways to sound detached is to take the person out of the sentence ("The samples were heated for ten minutes" not "I heated the samples for ten minutes."). 

It was one of the things that was always drummed into me at school when writing essays. “Don’t use I. The fact that it’s your opinion is implied.” The result is that we learned to bend over backwards to write around the implied “I” without being taught the proper tools to structure the information in a clearer, contextual way. We learned bad habits, and it can be really difficult to shake them later in life. Those habits follow us into everything else we write, fiction included.

It's also a convenient way to cover a lot of ground quickly. We’ll often use passive voice in placeholder text or brainstorming precisely because it doesn’t require specifics.  "The king is betrayed, the castle is taken, and the heir is hidden" gets through a lot of plot without stopping to say who did what, which is useful during ideation. 

And sometimes we just don't want to name someone, even when that someone is ourselves ("Mistakes were made" is the classic example of someone wanting to abdicate responsibility), or we haven't decided yet who's doing what, so the passive lets us keep writing without deciding. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a first draft, but it often gets left in when redrafting because we get used to it being there.

Why is too much passive voice a problem?

Passive voice isn’t wrong in and of itself. The issue is that an overuse of passive voice can make writing feel flat and distant, because the reader is told what happened without being shown the context of it happening. Compare "The door was opened, the room was searched, and the safe was found empty" with "Marcus opened the door, searched the room, and found the safe empty." Theyr’e the same events, but the second is punchier and feels more…well, active.

Another problem is that passive voice can often sound evasive. When the agent is missing, it isn't always clear who did what, and a long run of agentless sentences can start to sound like you, the writer, isn’t willing to commit, or doesn’t trust the reader with the information. That's fine when it's deliberate, but less so when it's just an accident of habit.

When is passive voice the right choice?

Passive voice isn't a mistake, so you don't need to remove every instance. There are plenty of times when it's the better option.

Let’s go all the way back to my “What is passive voice” section at the beginning of this post. What you might notice is that I actually started this with a sentence written in passive voice.

If the agent is unknown or doesn't matter, passive is often the most natural choice. "The lock had been forced" works if your detective doesn't know who did it yet, because an active sentence would need to give away the culprit. "The bridge was built in 1887" works because nobody needs the name of the construction crew. It's how we'd say it out loud, too: "My flight was cancelled" is what you'd tell a friend (unless you’re venomously calling out the airline).

It's also a good fit when the receiver, not the agent, is the focus of a sentence. "She was hit by a car" is about her, whereas "A car hit her" makes the sentence about the car. Which one you want depends on whose story you're telling.

Passive can also save the agent for last so the reveal lands: "The money had been stolen by the one person we all trusted." And it lets you start a sentence with the information that matters most, which can help sentences flow together: "I found a letter in the attic. It had been written by my grandmother." Keeping the letter as the subject of both sentences makes the pair feel connected, where "My grandmother had written it" would move the focus partway through.

It can even be part of a character's voice. A formal, reserved character (a butler, a civil servant, a very polite villain) might say "Your concerns have been noted" where a blunter one would say "I've noted your concerns," and the passive tells us something about them.

So you're not doing anything wrong simply by having passive sentences in your writing. Like all writing tools, when used intentionally it can be incredibly useful.

How do you spot it and fix it?

Like all writing advice, it comes down to moderation being key. While it’s fine to use passive voice intentionally, if you overuse it unintentionally, that can affect how your writing will land. If you want to revise to reduce the use of passive voice, then here is my advice:

Clarity is key. Always.

When you're revising, ask a few questions about each passive sentence you find. Who or what is doing the action? Does the reader need to know? Would the sentence be clearer if I wrote it another way? 

I know it would be nice to have a checklist for this, but there isn't a magic trick. It's a habit of asking yourself the most important questions: Is this as clear as it could be? Does it say what I want it to say?

It's also worth noting that you don’t need to worry about any of this for your first draft. Stopping to rework every sentence while you're still finding your way is a recipe for overwhelm and burn out. Get the words down first, then come back and revise.