Rewrite passive writing into direct, active sentences
"Mistakes were made" and "I made a mistake" carry the same information and completely different weight.
- Use it for
- Anyone with a draft that reads passively and wants it to read direct and confident instead.
Passive voice ("the decision was made," "an error was encountered") hides who's actually doing something, which reads as vague or evasive even when that's not the intent — it's a habit that creeps in through formal writing conventions, not a deliberate choice most of the time. This prompt finds every passive construction and rewrites it active, naming the actual actor, without just mechanically flipping sentence order.
When not to use this
If the actor is genuinely unknown or irrelevant to the point being made ("the building was constructed in 1920"), passive voice is actually the right choice there — this is for writing where the actor matters and got hidden by default.
Fill in
Here's the text: {{text}}
Rewrite this to eliminate passive voice — make every sentence name who
or what is doing the action, direct and active. Where the actor
genuinely isn't known or doesn't matter, tell me instead of forcing an
awkward active rewrite.Why it works
Requiring every sentence to name an actual actor, with an explicit exception for when the actor truly doesn't matter, is what prevents the rewrite from either forcing awkward active constructions everywhere or leaving genuinely vague passive sentences unfixed — passive voice isn't wrong, it's just usually unintentional, and the fix should target that.
Common mistakes
- ×Accepting a mechanical passive-to-active flip that reads more awkward than the original.
- ×Rewriting a sentence where the actor genuinely doesn't matter, adding a forced subject that wasn't needed.
Follow-ups
- This sentence still reads weak even though it's active now: {{sentence}}. Help me tighten it further.
- Check this new draft of mine for the same habit: {{new_draft}}.
Did this work?
Every sentence names who's doing the action, and the piece reads noticeably more direct without losing anything the passive version actually said.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.