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.

For more information:

Feedback

  • "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

  • "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

  • "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

  • "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