9 Best Passive to Active Voice Converters

Picture a situation where you want your sentences to sound impactful, but you aren’t ready to read and rewrite each phrase that you originally wrote in passive voice. In that case, passive to active voice converters were made for folks like you. 

When selecting the best passive to active voice converters, I considered how effective they were at contextual analysis. Even when the sentence doesn’t explicitly hint at the subject, a good piece of software for converting passive voice to active voice should still be able to identify what the subject is.

Without further ado, here are my top picks. 

Summary 

If you’d rather head straight to the point, I’ve summarized everything you need to know about these tools below:

With that out of the way, now let’s get down to the details. 

Grammarly  

Grammarly provides different types of editing suggestions, including those relating to converting passive voice to active. This popular software highlights the sentence that needs correction and provides the “best version” of it. I find that way better than directly instructing you to convert a passive phrase to an active one.  

Grammarly’s passive to active voice converter is available on the premium plan. But if all you need is a passive to active voice converter and not a full-on editing software, Grammarly may be too expensive for you.  

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid offers a passive to active voice converter free of charge but on a limited scale. By “limited scale,” I mean that this tool allows only ten free correction suggestions daily. It also limits these suggestions to the first 500 words of your text. 

To get unlimited suggestions and rephrases, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan.  This tool also comes with a free Google chrome extension to help improve your writing in real time. 

QuillBot

You can quickly access QuillBot’s passive to active voice converter from the menu bar on the left side of your window through its Grammar Checker. 

Unlike some passive to active voice converters, QuillBot doesn’t use different colors to highlight different editing suggestions. This makes it a little bit difficult to find instances of passive voice without scrolling through all the suggestions first. 

Soon after signing up for a free QuillBot account, I realized that I couldn’t convert passive voice to active voice for free. So, I upgraded my account to the least expensive premium plan—the monthly option. I was somewhat skeptical about what QuillBot could do, but after giving it a trial, I’m convinced that QuillBot is a cheap but worthy alternative to Grammarly and ProWritingAid. 

Writer Buddy

Writer Buddy has a couple of free AI writing assistants, one of which is the passive to active voice converter. It’s perfect if you don’t want to ever spend anything on converting passive to active voice. 

While I was thrilled to find software that charged me nothing, my excitement soon faded when I tried pasting an article into the input box. Writer Buddy converts at most 1000 characters at a time. Depending on the length of the words and punctuation used, a piece of text that’s 1000 words long could contain between 150 and 200 words. That said, I also found that I could work my way around this hurdle by pasting only sentences or paragraphs written in passive voice. 

Sapling

Sapling is another one of the free passive to active voice converters on this list. It converts just 250 characters (which could be between 40 and 50 words) at a time. 

But if converting passive voice to active is the last step of your editing phase for something that you want to turn in really soon, Sapling will slow you down.

While using Sapling, I had to carefully skim through the test article to find all the places where I used passive voice. I also had to split long sentences into chunks so that my input wouldn’t exceed Sapling’s limit. So is this tool helpful for large-scale content generation? In all honesty, no. 

Typli

Like other passive to active voice converters, Typli limits the number of characters you can input at any given time. I’m talking about just 500 characters. I was curious to see what Typli.ai could do, so I tested it using a short passage generated with ChatGPT. When rewriting the passage, Typli started three consecutive sentences with “they.” 

This might not matter for short-form content. However, such a repetitive writing pattern could make long-form content boring. Typli lets you try their passive to active voice converter for free. After you’ve used up your free 1000 words, you’ll have to part with a small monthly fee to continue converting passive voice to active with Typli.ai. 

Scalenut

For those seeking to convert sentences under 200 characters to active voice, Scalenut offers a passive to active voice converter online free, at no cost. This class of users excludes research paper writers, blog writers in some niches, and everyone else who can’t keep their sentences within that length limit. 

I’m not a fan of Scalenut’s user interface, though. When I logged in to my account for the first time, I had a bit of trouble finding the converter. For a tool that can process only 200 characters at once, I find Scalenut a little bit slow. Two whole minutes after I clicked “Generate,” Scalenut was still thinking of how to rewrite the sentence I inputted. 

LogicBalls

LogicBalls is an AI writing tool. While it can convert passive voice to active, it can’t help you verify the grammatical accuracy of the converted passage. 

I particularly love how LogicBalls allows you to choose the tone of the rewritten text. The app has over 50 tones, including those available to free plan users and those available to premium users, and it actually sticks to the selected tone when rewriting text.

Now, let’s skip to the not-so-good part. When converting passive voice to active, LogicBalls sometimes makes mistakes. I asked it to rewrite only one sentence, hoping for a high-quality output. However, the tool still inserted a passive phrase into the rewritten version of my sentence.  

Hemingway Editor 

Hemingway Editor is a renowned writing app. All passive phrases are highlighted in sky blue. But you won’t get any ideas on how to fix them unless you’re a Hemingway Plus user. 

Although Hemingway’s decluttered interface instantly frees up my mind to focus on the task at hand, I believe the app could be better at flagging occurrences of passive voice. I took the liberty to read the AI-generated article in the screenshot above and observed that Hemingway Editor missed some spots.

Reasons to Change From Passive to Active Voice

We’ve seen how different tools can help you convert your writing from passive to active voice. But why do that in the first place? Here are some good reasons. 

Enhance Clarity and Directness

When using the passive voice, you’re trying to take a curve to your destination instead of a straight line. Active voice helps you get straight to the point and assists the reader in following your train of thought from the beginning of the sentence to the end. For example, look at sentences A and B:

A: The report was completed by the team ahead of schedule.

B: The team completed the report ahead of schedule.

The facts speak for themselves here, right?  

Improve Reader Engagement

Converting passive voice to active directs the reader’s attention to the action doer. With this direction, the reader can form a mental image of what the doer is performing. The sentence becomes alive, and your audience feels as if the action’s subject is carrying it out in their presence.

Try reading the sentence below, for example:

The presentation was delivered by Sarah with enthusiasm.

It seems dead. You feel as if Sarah did what she wanted to do without waiting for you to witness it. Conversely, here’s the same sentence in active voice:

Sarah delivered the presentation with enthusiasm.

The sentence above gives you this warm feeling that comes with not being an outsider. 

Strengthen Your Writing Style

The passive voice is weak. It’s detached, impersonal, and pushes the reader away. This is why writing coaches often advise writers to avoid passive voice as much as possible. 

It may be useful for scientific writing or other content with an irrelevant or unknown subject. But such content often comes off as boring or overly professional. 

Increase the Impact of Your Content

Active voice makes your content more concise, confident, and likely to persuade your audience to take the intended action. When you write in this voice, you push the subject to take responsibility for their actions, which casts a cloak of authority over their figure and forces the reader to listen to what they have to say. 

Take this sentence, for instance: 

A lot of money was lost to the scammer.

Now compare the first sentence to this: 

He lost a lot of money to the scammer.

You’ll see that the second sentence appears bolder. By giving a name to the person responsible for the loss and putting him at the forefront, the sentence somehow incited stronger feelings such as pity and rage. 

Simplify Complex Information

Writing in a passive voice makes you inclined to lengthen your sentences because you’re trying to avoid too many “by” phrases.  

That’s because it crams too many actions into the sentence, making the information seem more complex.

For context, check out this sentence: 

Large quantities of text written by LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT 3, and GPT 4, and human-written texts, are gathered and collated into a dataset by the tool. 

Midway through the sentence, chances are you stopped reading and decided to reread the sentence from the beginning. This was because you found it a bit hard to follow my thought train. 

I broke up this sentence into three parts:

First, the tool gathers large quantities of text that LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT 3, and GPT 4 have written. It collates this text into a dataset. Then, it adds human-written texts to the dataset.

When I used the active voice, splitting the sentence was much easier. The three sets of sentences were also easier to read. 

Boost SEO and Online Visibility

Search engines like Google don’t like content that’s hard to read and understand. Users don’t favor such content, either. 

Reduced readability lowers how much time readers spend on your site. Consequently, your content will suffer higher bounce rates and much lower engagement. 

These are negative signals for search engines and SEO in general. In the grand scheme of things, you’ll find your site sinking to the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) for relevant keywords. 

Writing in an active voice enhances your audience’s comprehension of the information that you share on your blog. A satisfied first visitor is likely to make repeat visits to your site and become part of your growing loyal audience. 

There’s also a high chance that they’ll share your content with others, thus increasing your website’s link juice. In addition, an active voice is better for naturally incorporating keywords into content.

Align with Professional Writing Standards

An active voice sounds more professional. In fact, in the freelance writing world, knowing how and when to convert passive voice to active voice is an actual skill that could give you an edge over the competition. 

How to Convert From Passive Voice to Active Voice 

Want to do the conversation manually? Check out these quick steps: 

• Identify the passive sentence. 

Example: A lot of money was lost by him.

• Identify the subject and the object of the sentence. 

Example subject: He

Example object: money

• Scrap the “to be” verbal form. “is,” “was,” “were,” etc. are examples of “to be” verbs.
• Place the subject at the beginning of the sentence and the object at its end. 

Example: He lost a lot of money. 

That’s all! You have, on your own, switched the original passive sentence to an active one. For best results, keep practicing. 

Elevate Your Writing With a Passive to Active Voice Converter

Passive to active voice converters make conversion easier for you. It’s also worth noting that every tool I’ve reviewed in this article offer free desktop extensions. 

When enabled, these extensions give real-time suggestions for changing passive voice to active voice. That means you’ll spend more time writing than editing your content. 

Be careful when accepting these suggestions, though. If a recommendation alters the meaning of a sentence, I recommend leaving the sentence as it is. One or two passive phrases won’t ruin your content. 

Finally, if you’re looking for a passive to active voice converter free, I recommend Writer Buddy. But if you want a premium tool with powerful features, try Quillbot — it’s affordable and does the job fast.