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Lesson plan Grade 12 English Language Arts

Turning the Marnock Hollow Consent Order Into a Resident FAQ

A 90-minute grade 12 ELA lesson in which students convert a fictional wastewater consent order into an accurate plain-language FAQ for residents.

Objectives

  1. Students will unpack nominalizations in legal-technical prose by restoring the actor and the action.
  2. Students will identify hedges and deadline language that shift responsibility away from a named party.
  3. Students will draft FAQ entries that stay accurate to the source document while changing register and order.

Vocabulary

Effluent
Effluent is the cleaned water that leaves a treatment plant at the end of the process. It is tested carefully before being released to a river, lake, or the ocean.

Also: consent order, nominalization, register, hedge, infiltration and inflow

Teacher overview

A consent order settles an enforcement case between a state agency and a utility, and it is written in the register that lawyers and regulators use. Residents who want to know what will happen on their own street have to read it anyway. This lesson gives students an excerpt from a fictional consent order between a state agency and the Marnock Hollow Sanitary District, and asks them to produce the FAQ the utility owes its ratepayers. The misconception worth naming at the start is that plain-language rewriting means swapping hard words for easy ones. The harder and more useful work is grammatical and structural: restoring the actors that nominalizations delete, converting relative deadlines into calendar dates, and reordering the document so it opens with the question a resident actually has.

Procedure

Framing the task (10 min): Tell students that they are working for the fictional Marnock Hollow Sanitary District and that the board has asked for a one-page FAQ explaining the settlement. Establish the constraint that governs the whole lesson: the FAQ may simplify, but it may not promise anything the order does not require, and it may not soften anything the order states. Distribute the handout and have students read the order excerpt once without annotating.

Reading for structure (15 min): Students reread and label the excerpt's three moves in the margin: the recitals that establish who and what, the recitals that establish the problem, and the stipulated obligations. Ask them to note where the document first names a specific action the District must take, and how far into the text that appears. Most students will find it in the final paragraph, which sets up the reordering work later.

Modeling a nominalization (10 min): Project the phrase "exceedance of the monthly average effluent limitation for five-day biochemical oxygen demand on four occasions." Unpack it aloud, one move at a time: find the buried verb, name the missing actor, and rebuild the clause as "the District released more oxygen-demanding waste than its permit allows, in four different months." Make the point that the rewrite is longer and clearer, and that length is not the measure of plain language.

Paired analysis (15 min): In pairs, students highlight every hedge in one color and every nominalization in the other, then complete handout items 1 through 4. Circulate and press pairs on item 3, where students must say what the hedge "attributable in part to" allows the District to avoid stating outright.

Formative check (5 min): Poll the class on one question: does the order require the District to fix the sewer, or to submit a plan to fix the sewer? Do not move on until at least three-quarters of the class answers that the order requires a plan for departmental approval, plus flow monitoring and eventual compliance. Students who miss this will overpromise in their FAQ.

Drafting (25 min): Students complete handout items 5 through 8, which build the FAQ itself: the lead question, a plain rewrite of the infiltration and inflow recital, and a closing paragraph about what residents will and will not notice. Remind them to check every sentence against the order before they keep it.

Peer review (10 min): Partners trade drafts and apply one test only. For each FAQ sentence, the reviewer must point to the words in the order that support it. Any sentence the reviewer cannot trace gets struck or revised. Collect the handouts as the exit product.

Turning the Marnock Hollow Consent Order Into a Resident FAQ — Grade 12 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Marnock Hollow is a fictional town, and the order below is invented for this lesson. The Marnock Hollow Sanitary District treats the town's sewage and discharges to the fictional Nettlefen River.

Permit limits and reported results

Parameter Permit monthly average District reported, March District reported, July
Five-day biochemical oxygen demand 30 mg/L 38 mg/L 41 mg/L
Total suspended solids 30 mg/L 36 mg/L 33 mg/L

Excerpt: Stipulated Administrative Order, effective 1 March 2026

WHEREAS the Marnock Hollow Sanitary District (hereinafter the District) operates a publicly owned treatment works discharging to the Nettlefen River under Permit No. NF-0041; and

WHEREAS review of the discharge monitoring reports submitted by the District for the preceding calendar year indicates exceedance of the monthly average effluent limitation for five-day biochemical oxygen demand on four occasions and for total suspended solids on three occasions; and

WHEREAS such exceedances are attributable in part to the infiltration of groundwater and the inflow of stormwater into the collection system, a condition documented in the District's most recent capacity assessment;

NOW THEREFORE it is stipulated and agreed that the District shall (a) complete flow monitoring of the Arncliffe and Weir Lane sewersheds not later than the first anniversary of the effective date of this Order; (b) submit for departmental approval a corrective action plan providing for the rehabilitation of not less than 12,000 linear feet of gravity sewer; and (c) achieve continuous compliance with the effluent limitations set forth in the Permit not later than the fourth anniversary of the effective date.

Questions

  1. Rewrite the noun phrase "exceedance of the monthly average effluent limitation" as a full clause that names who did what.
  2. Using the table above, write one sentence stating what the permit allows for monthly average biochemical oxygen demand and what the District reported in July.
  3. The phrase "attributable in part to" is a hedge. Explain what the District avoids saying by using it, then rewrite that clause without the hedge.
  4. Obligation (c) sets a deadline as "not later than the fourth anniversary of the effective date." Rewrite that deadline as a calendar date a resident can put on a wall.
  5. Write the FAQ question a Marnock Hollow resident is most likely to ask first, then answer it in two or three sentences using only what the order and the table state.
  6. The excerpt never uses the word "sewage." Identify the two expressions it uses instead, and explain in two sentences what those choices do to a reader's sense of what is being discussed.
  7. Rewrite the recital about infiltration and inflow as two plain sentences for the FAQ, keeping the technical claim intact.
  8. Draft the FAQ's closing paragraph of three or four sentences explaining what residents will and will not notice while the work proceeds. Do not promise anything the order does not require.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: The District discharged more pollution than its permit allows. A strong rewrite names the actor (the District), supplies the buried verb (exceeded, or released more than), and keeps the object (the monthly average limit in its permit).
  2. Answer: The permit allows a monthly average of 30 mg/L, and the District reported 41 mg/L in July. Credit any sentence that pairs both figures correctly and identifies the July value as above the limit.
  3. Answer: The hedge "in part" lets the District avoid naming the other causes of the exceedances, which could include how it operated and maintained its own plant and pipes. Removing it produces something like: "Groundwater leaking into the pipes and stormwater running into them caused these exceedances." Students should note that the unhedged rewrite is now a stronger claim than the order actually makes, which is exactly why the hedge is there.
  4. Answer: Not later than 1 March 2030. Accept 1 March 2030 or "by March 2030," since the effective date is 1 March 2026.
  5. Answer: Answers will vary. A strong lead question is a version of "Is my water or my street affected?" or "Will my sewer bill go up?" The answer must stay inside the document, noting that the order requires monitoring, a plan submitted for approval, and full compliance by 2030, and that the order itself sets no rate.
  6. Answer: The excerpt uses "effluent" and "discharge," the latter in "discharging to the Nettlefen River" and "discharge monitoring reports." Both terms name the flow or the act of releasing rather than the material itself, which keeps a reader's attention on the permitted process and away from what is actually in the water.
  7. Answer: Answers will vary. A strong rewrite is close to: "Groundwater seeps into our sewer pipes through cracks, and stormwater runs into them through faulty connections. That extra water overloads the treatment plant, which is part of why the plant went over its limits." The rewrite must keep the two separate pathways rather than merging them into one.
  8. Answer: Answers will vary. A proficient paragraph promises only the three obligations: flow monitoring in the Arncliffe and Weir Lane sewersheds within one year, a corrective action plan submitted for state approval covering at least 12,000 linear feet of sewer, and full compliance by 2030. It should also say plainly that residents may see crews and street work in those two sewersheds, and that the order does not by itself change service or rates.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the excerpt with the three structural moves already labeled in the margin, and reduce the drafting load to items 1, 2, 4, and 5. Provide a two-column chart with the order's phrasing on the left and a sentence frame on the right: "This means that the District must ..." so the rewrite begins with a named actor every time.

Extension

Ask students to write a second version of the FAQ for a different audience: the fictional District's own field crews, who need to know what changes about their work. Students should identify which of their resident-facing simplifications become inaccurate or useless for that audience, and explain why in a short note to the teacher.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "consent order," "effluent," "infiltration," and "hedge" with one plain definition and one non-technical example each, and post them for the whole lesson. Allow items 1 and 4 to be answered orally before writing. Pair each student with a partner who can read the excerpt aloud slowly, since the length of the sentences, rather than the vocabulary, is what makes legal prose hard to follow.

Extensions

Have students compare their FAQ to the fictional District's press release, which the teacher writes in advance using only positive framing, and mark each press-release sentence as accurate, accurate but incomplete, or unsupported. Students then write a short memo to the board recommending which version to mail with the next bill, defending the recommendation on the grounds of accuracy rather than tone.