It began, as so many things do, with a friend forwarding an email she could hardly parse. The first message made little sense; the follow-up from a case manager arrived dense with jargon, couched in performative empathy, and copied unnecessarily to a wider audience. The tone was professional. The effect was punitive. The email accomplished what so many institutional communications do: it reinforced power while feigning care. I have stood in that same trembling place, reading a message about my own child, trying to decipher what had actually happened.
For parents of disabled or neurodivergent children, this ritual becomes grimly familiar. A child becomes distressed, loses language, or experiences sensory overload, and the report that follows arrives varnished with euphemism: unexpected behaviour, safety planning, a brief pause in attendance while supports are sequenced. The longer the sentence, the less it discloses. Each acronym—IEP, SBT, SSA—functions as a veil, concealing the human truth behind procedural tone. When your child cannot narrate what occurred, you are left sifting through bureaucratic debris in search of meaning.
Every parent deserves to know what has happened to their child without consulting a dictionary of institutional doublespeak. Every teacher deserves the time, trust, and support to write plainly. And every school that claims inclusion should be able to speak in words that carry accountability instead of abstraction.
Introducing the Incident Ipsum generator
Lorem ipsum is the placeholder text designers use, when awaiting final copy, e.g. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet urna integer eget nibh mattis fermentum condimentum. Pharetra feugiat posuere laoreet cras mi neque elit dapibus eget. Ut lacus convallis pretium proin suspendisse sapien lacus tristique et quam laoreet do. Since the begining of the internet, there have been parodies of Lorem ipsum, e.g. Hipster ipsum, Bacon ipsum, Cat ipsum.
Incident Ipsum by End Collective Punishment in Schools is a parody of this linguistic theatre—a satirical generator of perfectly empty school emails. Its vocabulary banks draw directly from the familiar grammar of administrative compassion: those endlessly recycled phrases that sound caring while concealing the absence of care. Click Generate message and watch as it constructs gently polished obfuscation. Adjust the tone inflation slider to choose your desired level of bureaucratic detachment.
Humour becomes a kind of clarity here. By exaggerating the form, we reveal its function. Bureaucratic language works by calming the surface of crisis, translating pain into procedure. Incident Ipsum turns that translation inside out, exposing the hollow space where truth should be.
Because when you have cried too many times trying to interpret what an email really means, sometimes the only way to reclaim your agency is to laugh, and to name the absurdity for what it is.
About this generator
This satirical tool assembles glossy phrases into emails that appear compassionate while advancing exclusionary outcomes; any resemblance to existing correspondence systems is a structural coincidence.
Add to Incident Ipsum
What’s the most unhinged word salad email that you’ve received from school or district staff? If you share the text, we will add elements to the generator.
