The phrase "a sort of passive" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing grammatical structures or styles that exhibit passive characteristics without being fully passive.
Example: "The sentence had a sort of passive tone, making it less direct and more formal."
Alternatives: "a kind of passive" or "a type of passive".
At best I hear a sort of passive inertia.
So I saw what this transformation was for many people — a sort of passive sacrifice.
Simons told him that he was only working on his own stuff until the war was over, as a sort of passive protest.
And not only that, because just saying they exist might be interpreted as a sort of passive critique: one must be prepared to say that these are not just individual stories, but stories relating to our larger nature, to the human condition.
So my plan for now is to use my inbox as a sort of passive notification center.
Instead, we have in place a sort of passive freeze - one that applies only to new planning, while permitting a huge amount of new construction to go ahead, since there is a backlog of plans that have already been approved but not yet implemented.
Latour emerges as a strange sort of passive saint, one who performs the miracle of seeing the world clearly and fondly.
I promise, she won't look at the gift as any sort of passive-aggressive protest against her parenting.
This is very much still a laboratory discovery, but a few years down the road, you might see this kind of thing built into chips as a sort of hybrid active-passive cooling solution.
After Campbell gave a spiel about how bad grammar schools are, McDonnell wryly said, "Watch my lips: I agree with Alastair Campbell 100percentt on this issue" – a great example of the sort of passive aggression Campbell spent the entire night attempting.
