Writing guide · 6 min read
Passive voice is not the villain writing teachers make it out to be. But it does have a cost, and knowing your percentage is the first step to using it on purpose.
By Alyssa Glasco, Founder · Published
You have been told, probably by more than one teacher, to cut passive voice. That advice is mostly right. But like most absolute rules about prose, it falls apart the moment you look at how good writing actually behaves.
Passive voice is a tool. It has specific jobs it does well and specific jobs it does badly. The percentage of passive constructions in a piece is one of the cleanest signals you have about whether you are using it on purpose.
A sentence is passive when the grammatical subject receives the action instead of performing it. “The letter was sent by Anna” is passive. “Anna sent the letter” is active. The action is the same. The spotlight is different.
Most of the time, passive voice costs you two things: momentum and clarity. The sentence gets longer, the verb gets weaker, and the actor disappears behind a wall of helping verbs. Readers slow down. They may not know why, but the pages start to feel like a slog.
In fiction, passive voice is especially punishing in scenes of action and conflict. “The sword was drawn by the knight” lands with a thud. “The knight drew his sword” lands like a hammer.
Passive voice detection is hard. The The Meridian tool uses a regex that catches roughly ninety percent of constructions reliably. It will miss some edge cases and occasionally flag things that are not truly passive. That is fine. The percentage is directional, not exact, and directional is enough to catch a passive voice habit before it becomes a rut.
When you want this to track automatically across every draft you write, sign up free. Your passive voice percent will sit next to your other craft metrics so you can see the trend, not just a single number.