Z518: PASSIVE_VOICE_DETECTED

• Severity: Error

  ---

  Penalty: 0.0 points | Category: general

• Remediation & Opt-In

  ---

  Auto-Fixable: No | Opt-In: No

---

Description

A passive voice construction was detected in prose (e.g., "is/are/was/were/be/been/being" followed by a past participle).

Passive voice often obscures the actor performing an action and makes technical explanations less direct and harder to follow.

Heuristic Limitations

Zenzic enforces Zero Subprocess / Radical Unawareness and strict RE2 discipline without heavy probabilistic NLP models (e.g. spaCy, NLTK). Passive voice detection is evaluated via deterministic regular expression pattern matching on prose tokens (with code blocks, inline code, HTML tags, and link targets masked). Consequently, certain legitimate passive expressions or participle adjectives may occasionally trigger advisory warnings.

---

How to Fix

Rewrite the sentence in active voice, placing the actor or subject before the action:

<!-- Before (Passive) -->
The configuration file is validated by Zenzic.

<!-- After (Active) -->
Zenzic validates the configuration file.

---

Configuration

Enable passive voice checking in .zenzic.toml:

[policies]
enable_passive_voice_check = true

---

Suppression

Suppress an intentional passive sentence with an inline comment:

<!-- zenzic:ignore:Z518 -->

---

Reference

See the Finding Codes Index for finding code details.