Passive with no actor
agentless-passiveon by defaultJapanese / English
A passive sentence ("the budget was approved") that never says who did it
Example
How to fix
Name the actor and make it active. "It was decided" becomes "the steering group decided". If you cannot name anyone, the reason you cannot is the real finding.
Why it matters
A passive without an actor removes the person from the sentence. The reader cannot tell who decided, or who will act.
What it does not flag
A passive that names the actor in the same sentence ("by the board") is not reported. Legal genres, where the passive is the form, do not run this rule.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L3
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- warning
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
- Reads from the document
- pos
Levels
Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).
| strict | reported when a sentence has 1 passives with no actor |
|---|---|
| normal | reported when a sentence has 1 passives with no actor |
| relaxed | reported when a sentence has 2 passives with no actor |
By genre
- Turned off by the genre in
- business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media
Message
This sentence is passive ("{word}") but never says who did it
Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay
Sources
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/agentless-passive.yaml