passive-voice-checker

passive-voice-checker is a skill for Claude Code from ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills. It costs 48 tokens per session (2,133 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A draft review that finds passive-voice sentences, explains whether each one weakens the writing, and suggests active alternatives when useful.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review articles against an active-voice style guide or to teach writers how active and passive sentences differ.
Why use it?
It helps make unclear or evasive prose more direct while keeping passive wording that serves a real purpose.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the autopunk-media-skills plugin — 187 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to review articles against an active-voice style guide or to teach writers how active and passive sentences differ.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills --skill passive-voice-checker
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install autopunk-media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 187 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for passive-voice-checker

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for passive-voice-checker

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills/passive-voice-checker.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,133 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00048 $0.02133
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01066
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00427
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00213

Measured 8d ago against content hash 32dd37e8b6d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

passive-voice-checker scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/magazine-journalism/editing/passive-voice-checker/SKILL.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Passive Voice Checker

What This Skill Does

Identifies every passive-voice construction in a draft, assesses whether each weakens or serves the prose, and offers active-voice alternatives for those that should be changed — while leaving justified passives alone.

When To Use This Skill

  • You are editing a draft that feels flat or evasive and suspect passive voice is part of the problem
  • A style guide requires active voice as the default and you need to verify compliance
  • You want a systematic review of voice before submitting a feature, investigation, or opinion piece
  • You are coaching a junior writer on active-voice habits and want flagged examples to discuss

What You Need To Provide

Required: The draft text to be reviewed.

Optional: The article type (news, feature, opinion, investigative) — this affects how strictly passive voice is treated; your tolerance level ("flag all passives" vs. "flag only those that weaken the prose"); any passages where passive voice is intentional and should not be flagged.

How the Assistant Approaches This

  1. Identifies all passive constructions. Scans the draft for every instance of passive voice — both obvious forms ("was arrested," "has been criticised") and subtler constructions ("is considered to be," "remains unaddressed"). Counts the total and calculates the passive-voice ratio as a percentage of all finite verbs.

  2. Classifies each instance. Not all passive voice is bad. Assigns each instance to one of three categories:

    • Weaken — change recommended. The passive obscures who did what, drains energy from the sentence, or allows the writer to avoid naming a responsible actor. Most common in news and investigative writing where attribution matters.
    • Neutral — change optional. The passive is not actively harmful but an active alternative would be slightly stronger. Common in transitions and background paragraphs.
    • Justified — keep. The passive is the better choice because the receiver of the action is more important than the actor, the actor is unknown or irrelevant, or the sentence rhythm benefits from the passive construction. Common in science writing and when the subject of the sentence is the story's focus.

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 131 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 32dd37e8b6d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

passive-voice-checker is a skill published in the GitHub repository ur-grue/autopunk-media-skills (32 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 2,133 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-04.

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