"Passive voice" check falsely flagging sentences as passive.

[AstroNerdBoy]

• I've read and understood the contribution guidelines.
• I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

Please give us a description of what happened.

In the Readability Analysis part of Yoast, the "Passive voice" has a falsely bloated count of what sentences are in a passive voice.

Please describe what you expected to happen and why.

I don't expect to see sentences flagged as passive that Microsoft Word does not flag as passive. I use Word when I perform professional editing to find and fix passive sentences. I've become annoyed at how bad Yoast is. When I check what I write for my blog and throw it into Word for a comparison, Yoast has all kinds of sentences flagged that Word sees as fine. And on rare occasions, Word will find an actual passive sentence that Yoast doesn't flag.

How can we reproduce this behavior?

1. https://anime.astronerdboy.com/2019/01/tonikaku-cawaii-chapter-39.html -- Yoast says it has 14.5% passive sentences while Word detects only 9%, including one that was missed by Yoast.
2. Basically, this can be done on any post of my blog at https://anime.astronerdboy.com. Sometimes the discrepancy is quite large.

Technical info

• WordPress version: 4.9.9
• Yoast SEO version: 9.4

• If relevant, which editor is affected (or editors):

• Classic Editor
• Gutenberg
• Classic Editor plugin

• Which browser is affected (or browsers):

• IE11
• Edge
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

• Relevant plugins in case of a bug:

• Tested with theme: N/A This isn't a theme issue. This is an issue with how your software identifies "passive sentences."

[moorscode]

I have moved this issue to the YoastSEO.js repository, as this is something handled by this language analysis library (which is included in the Yoast SEO plugin).

[manuelaugustin]

Thanks @AstroNerdBoy for the feedback! We're continuously working on improving our passive voice recognition. We've had a look at the post you've linked and there are indeed a few cases of incorrectly recognized passive sentences. We'll take this data into consideration for further improvements of our analysis!