Writing · October 30, 2026

Active or passive: which should you use?

By PWA Team

What the difference is

In an active sentence, the subject does the action: “The auditor found three errors.” In a passive sentence, the subject receives it: “Three errors were found by the auditor”, or just “Three errors were found.”

Most languages have some way to do this, though not always with the same grammar. Some use a form of “be” plus a participle, some use a reflexive verb, some an impersonal “one” or “they”. The question behind it is the same everywhere: does the sentence name who acted, and does it make them the subject?

Why active is the default

Readers look for two things in a sentence: who acted, and what they did. The active voice makes the actor the subject, so the reader meets them first. The passive moves the actor out of that place, further into the sentence, or drops it entirely, so the reader has to work it out or guess.

The second version is barely shorter, but it answers the questions a reader would ask next: who decided, and who raised the concerns. It is also easier to reply to.

When the passive is the right choice

The passive isn't a mistake. It is a tool for moving attention, and it is the honest choice in four situations:

• The actor is unknown. “The window was broken overnight.” You don't know who did it, and inventing someone would be worse.
• The actor doesn't matter. “The samples were stored at 4 °C.” The reader needs the temperature, not the name of the lab assistant.
• The actor is obvious. “He was elected in 2019.” Voters elect people; saying so adds nothing.
• The thing acted on is the topic. In a paragraph about a contract, “The contract was signed on Friday” keeps the contract at the front, where the reader's attention already is.

Scientific and legal writing use the passive often for these reasons, and readers in those fields expect it. In some languages, such as Indonesian and Malay, the passive is common in everyday writing too; there, the four tests above matter more than any rule about defaults.

When it becomes a problem

The passive turns into a problem when it hides responsibility the reader needs to know about. “Mistakes were made” is the famous example: it admits that something went wrong without saying who did it, which is usually why it was written that way.

The same thing happens by accident in work writing. “The invoice will be sent next week” sounds fine until the invoice doesn't arrive and nobody knows whose job it was. If a sentence describes a task, a decision or a mistake, the reader almost always needs a name. Other constructions hide the actor the same way: “mistakes happened”, “it was decided”, or an impersonal “one” or “they”.

How to turn passive into active

1. Find the actor: ask who actually did it. In English, it often hides in a “by …” at the end of the sentence.
2. Make the actor the subject and put it first.
3. Put the verb in its active form and check that the sentence still says the same thing.

If you can't find an actor, or naming one would mislead, keep the passive. That is the test working, not failing.

A quick check before you send

Scan your draft for passive forms; in English, those are sentences built around “was”, “were”, “has been” or “will be” plus an action. For each one, ask whether the reader needs to know who acts. If they do, rewrite it. If they don't, leave it alone.

If you'd like a second version to compare, select the sentence in Private Writing Assistant, press Rewrite and choose Fluent or Professional. You get a new wording with the changes highlighted, in the language you wrote in, and you decide which to keep. Our post on how long a sentence should be covers the other common reason a sentence is hard to read.