Passive voice isn't a grammar error — it's a valid sentence structure. But it's worth catching in your own writing because it often does two unhelpful things at once: it hides who's actually responsible for an action, and it usually makes the sentence longer than it needs to be.
Passive voice puts the receiver of an action in the subject position, with a form of "to be" plus a past participle, often followed by "by ___" (or nothing at all).
A quick test: if you can insert "by zombies" after the verb and it still grammatically works ("the report was submitted [by zombies]"), you're looking at passive voice.
Passive voice is genuinely useful when the doer of the action is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately being de-emphasized:
Don't eliminate passive voice on sight — check whether it's hiding information the reader actually needs. If naming who did the action would make the sentence more useful or more honest, switch to active. If it wouldn't change anything meaningful, passive voice is fine as-is.
Passive constructions are easy to write without noticing, since they often sound formal or "proper" rather than obviously wrong. Proofread Bot flags passive voice in your text and explains whether switching to active would actually improve the sentence.
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