A common mistake is to assume every past form of the 'to be' verb is passive voice (e.g. Our passive voice detector finds this form, as well as other less common constructions, including additional auxiliary verbs like 'get' (e.g.

The most common passive voice construction is a variant of the auxiliary verb 'to be' followed by the past participle of a transitive verb. While there's nothing grammatically incorrect about passive voice, the general rule of thumb is to strive for less than 2% passive voice. Passive voice is often avoided by professional writers because it can make the sentence needlessly longer, more complicated and unclear as well as shifting the emphases away from the sentence subject. When a sentence is written in passive voice, the subject is being acted upon rather than doing the acting.

The passive voice detector automatically detects passive voice in a block of text (now with the aid of zombies!).