Grammarly Passive Voice: When to Use It and When to Avoid It
Grammarly Passive Voice: When to Use It and When to Avoid It explains what the passive voice is, how to spot it in your own sentences, and the situations where it is the better choice. Grammarly is a writing-assistant company whose blog publishes guides on English grammar and style. The article compares the two voices, shows how to turn one into the other, and lists the cases where the passive earns its place.
100% Free (unlimited): The article is on the blog in full, open to anyone, with no account and nothing to unlock. Grammarly sells its writing tool and the page invites you to install it, but the guide itself, its examples and its table of contents are there to read without signing up for anything.
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The guide defines grammatical voice, explains why the passive has a poor reputation, and sets the two voices side by side. It then shows how to identify a passive sentence and how to turn it into the active, lists five situations where the passive is the right choice, covers two deliberate uses of it, and says when to avoid it.
Use the section on identifying the passive to go through a draft of your own and find the sentences where the doer has disappeared. The five situations tell you which of them to keep, among them a statement whose doer is unknown and a sentence where the focus belongs on the result. The part on beating around the bush shows what a reader hears when the passive hides who acted.
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