Adverb & Passive Voice Checker
Two habits quietly drain energy from otherwise good prose, and this adverb & passive voice checker catches both: leaning on -ly adverbs, and letting the subject of a sentence disappear behind a passive verb. Paste a chapter and see exactly where each one is happening, with density per 1,000 words.
Scan your prose
Paste text below and the counts update as you type. Load the sample if you want to see it working first.
What This Tool Looks For, And Why It Matters
An -ly adverb is usually a signal that the verb underneath it is doing too little work. "He walked slowly" asks the reader to picture walking and then adjust the speed; "he shuffled" delivers the whole image in a single word. Stripping adverbs is not about obeying a rule, it is about noticing where a stronger verb was available and you reached for a modifier instead.
Passive voice moves the actor out of the driving seat. In "the vase was broken", nobody breaks anything, and the action simply happens to an object. That is occasionally exactly what you want, particularly when the actor is unknown or deliberately hidden, but at scene level it flattens cause and effect and drains urgency from the page.
This scanner counts both habits, then divides by your word count so you get a density figure that is comparable between a 900-word scene and a 90,000-word novel. Raw totals tell you almost nothing on their own. Density tells you whether the pattern is occasional or structural.
False positives are filtered
Plenty of ordinary words end in -ly without being adverbs at all. Family, reply, supply, early, holy and ugly are excluded, along with adjectives such as lovely, friendly and elderly, so the count reflects real modifiers.
How passives are detected
The scanner looks for a form of the verb to be, then checks the next two words for a past participle, meaning an -ed ending or one of the common irregulars such as gone, taken, written and brought.
Density beats raw totals
Forty adverbs in a 15,000-word chapter is unremarkable. Forty in a 900-word scene is a problem. Dividing by length is the only honest way to compare one piece of writing against another.
Nothing leaves your machine
The whole analysis happens in JavaScript on the page you are already looking at. Your manuscript is never sent to a server, stored, logged or used to train anything.
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Adverb & Passive Density Benchmarks by Genre
Typical ranges per 1,000 words, drawn from what editors in each category tend to accept without comment.
| Genre | Adverbs per 1,000 | Passives per 1,000 | What pushes it higher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thriller / suspense | 4 - 9 | 2 - 5 | Long action sequences written at a distance |
| Romance | 7 - 13 | 3 - 7 | Interior emotion reported rather than dramatised |
| Literary fiction | 8 - 15 | 5 - 12 | Deliberate register; passives used for effect |
| Cozy mystery | 8 - 14 | 3 - 8 | Chatty narrator voice and stage directions |
| Middle grade | 6 - 12 | 2 - 6 | Explaining feelings instead of showing them |
| Memoir | 9 - 16 | 6 - 12 | Distance from painful events, reported speech |
| Business / self-help | 6 - 12 | 10 - 20 | Process description and institutional phrasing |
| Academic nonfiction | 5 - 11 | 18 - 35 | Convention: the method, not the researcher, leads |
Adverbs & Passive Voice, Answered
Are adverbs actually bad writing?
No. They are a tool, and a well-placed adverb can carry a sentence that no single verb would. The problem is habitual use, where a modifier gets bolted onto a vague verb again and again. Look at your ranked list: if one adverb appears fifteen times, that is a tic worth fixing, and the rest can stay.
How many adverbs per 1,000 words is too many?
Under ten is comfortably tight for most commercial fiction. Between ten and seventeen is normal and rarely draws comment. Above seventeen, readers start to feel the prose being explained to them rather than shown. Category matters too, which is why the benchmark table splits the ranges out.
Is passive voice always wrong?
Absolutely not. Passive construction is correct and often preferable when the actor is unknown, irrelevant or being deliberately concealed, and it is the house style across most academic writing. What you want to avoid is drifting into it by accident in scenes where a character is clearly doing something.
Why did the tool flag a sentence that is not passive?
Detection relies on pattern matching rather than a full grammar parse, so a form of to be followed closely by an -ed word will register even when it is really an adjective, as in she was tired. Treat every flag as a prompt to reread the line, never as a verdict.
Does it miss any passive constructions?
Some, yes. Constructions where several words sit between the auxiliary verb and the participle, or where the participle is an uncommon irregular form, can slip through. The figure you get is a reliable floor rather than an exhaustive census.
Should I aim for zero on both counts?
That would produce strange, brittle writing. Prose stripped of every modifier and every passive reads as though it has been sanded down. The goal is awareness of a pattern, then judgement applied line by line, not a score of nothing.
Can I scan an entire novel at once?
You can paste a full manuscript, though very large texts take a moment and the highlighted preview only renders the first 6,000 characters to keep the page responsive. Working chapter by chapter is usually more useful anyway, because it shows you which sections drift.
Is my manuscript safe here?
Yes. Every calculation runs locally in your own browser, there is no upload step, and no copy of your text is retained. Close the tab and the text is gone. You can even disconnect from the internet before pasting and the tool will still work.
Professional Nonfiction Formatting, Print and Ebook
Once your sentences are doing what you want, the layout has to carry them. We typeset nonfiction manuscripts with proper heading hierarchy, running heads, notes, tables and a clean ebook conversion built from the same source.
See Nonfiction Formatting