Active-Voice Audit — Keep or Convert, Per Sentence

Passive voice is not a defect to be stamped out. Told to "check the passive voice" in a passage, base models over-correct: they convert every passive sentence to active, including the ones where passive was the right call, and they invent an actor to fill the subject slot even when no actor is known or the actor does not matter. That mangles methods sections, recipes, and neutral statements of fact.

The judgment this skill supplies is the boundary: convert the passives that hide a doer the reader needs; keep the ones where naming a doer adds nothing or would be wrong. Evaluate one sentence at a time and give a verdict — KEEP or CONVERT — with a one-line reason. Provide the active rewrite only for the sentences you mark CONVERT.

CONVERT — passive that hides an actor the reader needs

Rewrite to active when a specific, relevant doer exists and the passive is obscuring it:

• Accountability is buried. "Mistakes were made and the account was suspended." Who

made them, who suspended it? If someone is responsible and the reader needs to know, name them: "The billing team suspended the account." "Mistakes were made" is the classic dodge — convert it.

• A decision has no owner. "It was decided to cut the feature." Say who decided.
• An explicit by-agent is already there. "The report was written by the committee"

reads better active: "The committee wrote the report." The doer is present and relevant, so lead with it.

• The actor is the point. In a sentence whose real content is who did something to

whom, active puts the doer up front where the reader expects it.

KEEP — passive that is doing a job

Leave the sentence passive (do not flag it, do not invent an actor) when:

• The doer is unknown. "The cathedral was completed around 1310." No one knows or

needs the specific masons. Forcing "Some builders completed it" is worse.

• The doer is obvious or irrelevant. "The escaped prisoner was recaptured overnight."

By the authorities, of course — saying so adds noise.

• It is a methods, recipe, or process description. "The tissue was stained and left

overnight." "The onions are sautéed until soft, then the stock is stirred in." Here the convention is deliberately actor-free: the reader cares about the step, not that a researcher or cook performed it. Naming the actor ("We stained the tissue…") is a stylistic choice the author owns, not a fix you should impose.

• The affected thing is the topic. When the sentence's subject is what the paragraph

is about, passive keeps the topic in the subject slot: a bio that opens on a person and then says she "was recruited" and "was given" a team keeps her in the subject; flipping to "The board recruited her" shoves the topic aside and breaks the through-line.

• The actor is deliberately general. Policy and legal text — "Refunds shall be issued

at the company's discretion" — often keeps the actor unnamed on purpose. Do not pin it down.

• It states a general truth with no agent. "Granite is formed under great heat and

pressure." There is no doer to promote.

The default failure to avoid

The mistake is treating "passive" as the trigger and "make it active" as the fix. Passive voice is the symptom you inspect, not the verdict. A clean audit will KEEP more sentences than it converts on a methods-heavy or fact-heavy passage, and will only convert where an active rewrite genuinely serves the reader by surfacing a doer that matters. If a sentence is passive and you cannot name a specific, relevant actor to put in front, that is itself the signal to KEEP it.

Output shape

For each passive sentence you examine, report:

• the sentence,
• KEEP or CONVERT,
• a one-line reason tied to a rule above,
• and, for CONVERT only, the active rewrite.

Do not rewrite sentences you mark KEEP. Do not touch sentences that are already active.