What began in June 2020 from observations of the passive voice in an Instagram caption and how, because of the passive voice, it did not tell the full American story, is now a program of wrkSHäp | kiloWatt, a historic preservation and owner’s representative studio in New York.

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Feedback

  • "kennedy is doing necessary, valuable work and deserves to be compensated for her labor -- intellectual, emotional and physical -- to conceptualize and share with others. Your efforts are seen and appreciated, kennedy. Thank you!"

    Executive Director, US-based Historic Preservation Non-profit

  • "You're doing important work with great potential to advance the field of history and historic preservation."

    Cindy Olnick

    Communications for historic places,

    preservation, and heritage conservation

  • "This project investigates and attempts to provide a concrete set of guidelines for historical writing about race, racism, chattel slavery, lynching, and other forms of structural oppression in the U.S. The author focuses specifically on grammatical choices (such as truncated passives) used to remove the agent and agency from perpetrators of white supremacy. I am not a linguist or composition scholar, so I cannot speak to the sentence level structure in relation to racism, but as some who studies rhetoric, I can speak to questions of omission, low lighting, and highlighting that frame readers and authors relation to historic racial violence. Overall, the goal of improving historical writing in ways retell histories of racist violence in ways that attribute responsibility is no doubt important. I encourage that author to spend more time on what is happening in Florida right now and all of its institutional gag orders about teaching precisely what the author is referring to (i.e. Critical Race Theory as a catch all for anything, include documented historical facts, that make white folks "uncomfortable")."

    Anonymous, Rhetoric Researcher

  • "... and,  thanks to you [(un)Redact the Facts],  I gave a local museum a gentle request to un-redact a story.  There is so much more they could do that I could say, including about their convenient mythogical origin story, but this was a poke that you inspired, and they 'liked' it on Facebook, so maybe it is a start." Facebook post 5/14/2024 Enumclaw Plateau Historical Society Museum Where Did Enumclaw Come From? Adapted from Stephanie Kellogg’ story in Enumclaw Living my comment to them:  "Good for you to preserve history and tell the stories. Please consider updating your sentence, “Before American settlers made Washington their home, the West Coast was occupied by the local indigenous tribes,”  to eliminate redactions and change it from passive voice to active voice. Something like this could tell people who the actors were and who is still here: “Before White American settlers and railroads took the land from the indigenous Native American people and made Washington their home, the West Coast was occupied by local indigenous people. These Native Americans continued to live and adapt and are vital members of our community today.” "Rather than using White settler second-hand versions of stories, why not invite the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe to tell their ancestors’ stories themselves in their own words?”

    Don Brubeck, US

  • "I've been teaching business writing skills for the last 20 years or so and face an ongoing battle to lure people away from using the passive voice! Your focus on how this applies to writing about slavery and abuse of black people is a really powerful illustration of how the passive voice creates distance and insidiously protects those responsible for cruelty and abuse. Thanks very much for highlighting this and good luck with your work."

    Ian Hembrow

    Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College

    University of Oxford, UK