“The request will be reviewed, and a response will be sent.” The sentence sounds complete. Yet a reader cannot tell who reviews the request, who replies, or whether they need to do anything next. A smooth AI rewrite can leave that gap untouched.
Ask who performs the action
When editing a draft, look at the actions that matter to the reader: submitting, checking, approving, paying, sending, or correcting. For each one, ask who performs it. This is especially useful in service descriptions, team updates, and instructions, where an unnamed action can become an unassigned task.
Digital.gov's plain-language guidance explains that active voice helps make responsibility clear. In an active sentence, the person or organization doing the action is the subject. The workflow below is an editorial application of that principle, with invented examples. It is not a claim that AI-generated text uses one grammatical form at a particular rate.
Find the missing fact before rewriting
Start with “The draft will be approved before publication.” A tempting edit is “The editor will approve the draft before publication.” That sounds clearer, but it adds a fact: the editor owns approval. If the actual approver is the project lead, the clearer sentence is wrong.
Check the source brief, agreed process, or relevant owner. If the role is unknown, leave an editorial question: “Who approves this draft?” Do not publish the question as finished instructions. Resolve it, or describe only what is known if the document can still serve its purpose without that detail.
Separate an unclear sentence from an unclear process. Editing can expose the absence of an owner; it cannot appoint one. A team may need to make a decision before you can finish the copy. That is a useful result of review, even when it temporarily prevents a polished paragraph.
Keep the actor specific enough to help
In a hypothetical process, the source confirms that the support team checks requests and the account holder supplies missing information. The revised copy could say: “Our support team checks your request. If details are missing, we email you a list. You can add those details through your account.” Each action now has an identifiable participant.
Those details are appropriate only because the hypothetical source confirms them. Do not borrow the email channel or account workflow for a real service without checking it. The same applies to deadlines: adding “within two days” turns a language edit into a service promise.
Watch vague active subjects as well. “They will handle it” is active, but the responsibility is still unclear if several teams were mentioned. Name the team or role where needed, and use our guide to unclear references in AI drafts for the separate problem of pronouns without a clear referent.
Use passive voice when it serves the meaning
There is no need to convert every passive sentence. “The parcel was damaged in transit” may correctly emphasize what happened when the person responsible is unknown. Naming a courier as the cause would go beyond that evidence. Similarly, a report may focus on an object or outcome because that is what the reader needs to understand.
The practical question is whether the missing actor prevents understanding or action. If a page tells readers a document “must be submitted,” they need to know whether they submit it or another organization does. If a historical description says a building “was restored,” the restorer's identity may be less central to that paragraph.
Do not treat every occurrence of “was” as passive voice. “The office was quiet” describes a state. A word search can help locate candidates, but you still need to read the sentence. Removing ordinary verbs merely to satisfy a style target can make prose less natural.
Give an AI editor a constrained request
Try this prompt: “Review this draft for actions whose responsible person or team is unclear. Quote each relevant sentence and ask a question about the missing owner. Suggest a rewrite only when the source text identifies the actor. Preserve deadlines, conditions, permissions, and uncertainty. Do not invent roles or processes.”
Review suggestions against the source yourself. In particular, check that the rewrite has not changed “may” to “will,” made an optional step mandatory, or assigned the reader a task that belongs to staff. Our guide to preserving uncertainty covers those changes in more detail.
Finish with a reader's action check
Read the edited section as someone using it for the first time. Can you name who performs each important action? Can you distinguish what the reader does from what the service does? Are any owners, channels, or response times present only because they sounded plausible during rewriting?
You can use AI Undetectable's editing tools to explore wording after verifying the underlying responsibilities. Keep the source beside the revision and retain only accurate changes. Clear responsibility is a reader benefit, not evidence of human authorship or a promise about detector results.
A finished edit should help the reader understand who does what while remaining faithful to what you actually know. Sometimes that means a shorter active sentence. Sometimes it means asking the process owner one necessary question before publishing.