Worksheet Grade 12 English Language Arts
Audience and Diction in the Morrow Bend Digester Explainer
A grade 12 ELA worksheet in which students diagnose nominalization, passive voice, and buried claims in a fictional plant's nutrient recovery explainer.
Objectives
- Students will identify nominalizations and passive constructions that obscure the actor in a technical sentence.
- Students will explain how sentence order buries or surfaces the main idea of a paragraph.
- Students will revise technical prose for a general reader without losing accuracy.
Vocabulary
Key words: nominalization, passive voice, anaerobic digestion, struvite, jargon, register
Teacher overview
Treatment plants increasingly recover useful products from what they clean out of sewage, including methane burned for heat and power and a phosphorus mineral that can be bagged and sold as slow-release fertilizer. Explaining that work to neighbors is a writing problem, because the engineers who know the process best tend to write in nominalizations and passive constructions that hide who does what. This worksheet gives students a draft explainer from a fictional plant, written the way such drafts really arrive, and asks them to diagnose specific sentence-level failures and repair them without softening any of the facts.
Student Worksheet
Morrow Bend and its water resource recovery facility are fictional, and the draft below was written for this worksheet. Read the draft, then answer the questions. Each sentence is labeled so you can refer to it by letter.
Draft explainer, Morrow Bend Water Resource Recovery Facility
(A) The facility has undertaken the implementation of an anaerobic digestion process upgrade.
(B) Solids removed during treatment are conveyed to sealed tanks in which the exclusion of oxygen is maintained.
(C) Under these conditions, the decomposition of organic material by microbial communities results in the generation of biogas.
(D) Utilization of the biogas occurs in an engine, with the result that a portion of the facility's electrical demand is offset.
(E) A secondary benefit is the recovery of phosphorus.
(F) Phosphorus, if it is discharged to the river, is a contributor to algal growth.
(G) In the recovery reactor, the addition of magnesium is performed, and the formation of struvite crystals takes place.
(H) The struvite is subsequently dried and bagged.
(I) Sale of the product to regional growers is anticipated.
(J) The project was approved by the Board following review by staff.
- State the main idea of the draft in one sentence of your own.
- Identify the sentence where a general reader first learns why any of this matters to the river. Explain what the placement costs the draft.
- A nominalization turns a verb into a noun. Find four nominalizations in sentences A through D, and give the verb hiding inside each one.
- Rewrite sentence A in no more than ten words, keeping the same meaning.
- Sentence B uses the passive voice twice. Name who or what performs each action, and say whether the draft tells you.
- Sentence C is grammatically correct and still hard to read. Explain why, using the terms nominalization and actor.
- Rewrite sentence D so that the engine is the subject and the sentence is under fifteen words.
- Sentence F states a cause without naming an effect a reader would care about. Add one clause that names the effect on the river.
- Reorder the ten sentences so that a general reader meets the point of the project first. Give the new order as a list of letters, and justify your first two choices.
- Sentence J uses the passive voice. Explain one reason a writer might keep it that way in this document.
- Two technical terms in the draft need a plain gloss for a general reader. Name them, and write a gloss of fewer than fifteen words for each.
- Rewrite sentences A through E as a single paragraph of four sentences for a neighborhood newsletter. Keep every fact, use active verbs, and do not exceed one hundred words.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: The plant now digests its solids without oxygen to make biogas for electricity, and it also pulls phosphorus out of the waste stream and sells it as fertilizer. Accept any one-sentence statement that names both the energy result and the phosphorus result.
- Answer: Sentence F, which is the sixth of ten sentences and the only place the river appears. Placing it after the whole digester explanation means a reader who stops early never learns that the project keeps a nutrient out of the river, so the draft buries its strongest reason for public support.
- Answer: Accept any four of "implementation" from implement, "exclusion" from exclude, "decomposition" from decompose, "generation" from generate, and "utilization" from utilize. Each hides an action inside a noun and forces a weak main verb such as "has undertaken" or "results in."
- Answer: Accept any accurate rewrite of ten words or fewer, such as "The plant upgraded its anaerobic digesters." The rewrite must keep the plant as the actor and the digesters as the object.
- Answer: Plant equipment, most likely pumps or conveyors, moves the solids, and plant operators or the tank design maintain the oxygen-free condition. The draft names neither actor, which is what the passive construction allows it to avoid.
- Answer: The sentence's grammatical subject is a nominalization, "the decomposition," so the real actors, the microbes, appear inside a prepositional phrase instead of in the subject position. The main verb, "results in," carries no meaning of its own, which leaves the reader to assemble the action from three nouns.
- Answer: Accept any rewrite under fifteen words with the engine as subject, such as "An engine burns the biogas and supplies part of the plant's electricity." The rewrite must keep both the burning and the electricity result.
- Answer: Accept any clause that names a consequence in the river, such as "which feeds algae blooms that strip oxygen from the water and can kill fish." A strong answer connects algal growth to a change a reader would notice or care about.
- Answer: Accept any order that opens with the purpose and the public benefit. A defensible order is F, E, A, B, C, D, G, H, I, J. A justification should say that F gives the reader a reason to care, and that E names the result the reader is being asked to care about, so the process description that follows has somewhere to land.
- Answer: The passive keeps the focus on the project and the decision rather than on the individuals who made it, which suits a document that reports an institutional action. It also avoids implying that any single board member is responsible for a collective vote.
- Answer: Accept any two of "anaerobic digestion," "struvite," "biogas," and "recovery reactor," each with an accurate gloss under fifteen words, such as "anaerobic digestion: breaking down waste in sealed tanks with no oxygen" and "struvite: a mineral of phosphorus and magnesium that works as slow-release fertilizer."
- Answer: Accept any four-sentence paragraph under one hundred words that keeps the digester upgrade, the oxygen-free tanks, the biogas, the electricity offset, and the phosphorus recovery, and that uses active verbs with named actors. A model response reads: "Morrow Bend has upgraded its digesters. Operators now send the solids removed from sewage into sealed tanks that keep oxygen out. Microbes break the material down there and release a gas the plant burns in an engine, which supplies part of its own electricity. The same process also lets the plant recover phosphorus."
Differentiation
Support
Provide the draft with the ten nominalizations already circled and a two-column chart headed "noun" and "verb inside it," so students begin item 3 by filling in the second column. Allow items 9 and 12 to be completed with a partner, and give the first sentence of the item 12 paragraph as a starter.
Extension
Ask students to write a second version of the item 12 paragraph for a different audience, a state permit reviewer rather than a neighbor, and then annotate three specific choices that differ between the two versions and explain what each choice does for its reader.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "nominalization" and "passive voice" with a pair of matched non-technical examples, such as "the arrival of the bus occurred" beside "the bus arrived." Provide a glossary card for "digestion," "solids," "phosphorus," and "crystal," and allow items 3, 5, and 11 to be answered as lists rather than sentences.