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Worksheet Grade 12 English Language Arts

Information Order in Wrayburn's Lead Service Line Letter

A grade 12 ELA worksheet on cohesion and sequence: students repair a fictional utility letter whose sentences are all accurate but arrive in the wrong order.

Objectives

  1. Students will identify sentences that introduce new information before the reader has the ground for it.
  2. Students will repair cohesive ties whose reference is missing or ambiguous.
  3. Students will reorder a document so that definitions and requests arrive where a reader needs them.

Vocabulary

Service line
A service line is the small pipe that connects the water main under the street to the plumbing inside one home or building. It is the last leg of the trip water makes to your tap.
First-draw sample
A water sample taken from a faucet after the water has sat still in the pipes for hours, usually first thing in the morning. It shows how much lead can build up in water that sits in a home's pipes.

Also: cohesion, referent, given information, inventory

Teacher overview

A document can be accurate sentence by sentence and still fail, because readers build meaning in sequence and cannot use a fact they meet before they have anywhere to put it. The letter in this worksheet contains no false statement. It opens with federal rulemaking, defines its central term after using it three times, drops a national figure into the middle, and buries its one request for action near the end. Students diagnose the order rather than the wording, which is the harder and more transferable half of revision, and then rebuild the opening so a resident learns what is being asked of them before anything else.

Information Order in Wrayburn's Lead Service Line Letter — Grade 12 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Wrayburn Municipal Water, Feltham Street, and the letter below are fictional, invented for this worksheet. Every sentence in the letter is labeled so you can refer to it by number.

Letter from Wrayburn Municipal Water

S1. In October 2024 the Environmental Protection Agency finalized the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, which lower the lead action level from 15 ppb to 10 ppb in 2027 and require systems to replace nearly all lead service lines within ten years.

S2. This has been the subject of considerable planning here.

S3. Wrayburn Municipal Water has completed the service line inventory required of every system in the country.

S4. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 4 million lead service lines remain in US water systems.

S5. Your address on Feltham Street is served by a line whose material we could not verify from our records.

S6. A service line is the pipe that carries water from the main under the street, past the meter, and into your home.

S7. The portion on your side of the meter belongs to you.

S8. We are asking residents in the unverified category to collect a first-draw sample using the kit enclosed with this letter.

S9. A first-draw sample is water that has been sitting in your household pipes for at least six hours.

S10. Results will be mailed within thirty days.

S11. The department will schedule verification digs on Feltham Street in the spring.

S12. If your line is found to be lead, replacement will be scheduled at no cost to you under the program described above.

Wrayburn service line inventory

Category Service lines
Known non-lead 4,120
Known lead 386
Galvanized requiring replacement 240
Material unverified 1,308

Questions

  1. Which sentence should open the letter for a Feltham Street reader? Give its label and justify the choice in one sentence.
  2. S2 begins with "This." Name the cohesion problem and rewrite the sentence so the reference is explicit.
  3. The letter uses "service line" in S1, S3, and S4 before defining it in S6. Rewrite S6 so the definition rides inside the sentence where a resident first needs it.
  4. Which sentence is the letter's only request for action? Give its label and state where in the letter it should appear.
  5. S4 gives a national figure. Explain what a Feltham Street reader can and cannot do with it, then rewrite the sentence so it connects to that reader's situation.
  6. Using the inventory table, state how many Wrayburn service lines fall into the category S5 describes.
  7. Using the inventory table, state how many service lines the department has already confirmed as either lead or galvanized requiring replacement.
  8. S12 refers to "the program described above." Explain the cohesion problem and rewrite the phrase so it points to something the letter actually names.
  9. Put S5, S6, S8, and S9 in an order that gives a reader the ground for each new step. Justify the order in one sentence.
  10. Combine S8 and S9 into a single sentence in which the definition arrives before the term is used.
  11. Write a topic sentence for a paragraph made of S10, S11, and S12.
  12. Write a new opening paragraph of three sentences using only information already in the letter or the table, ordered so that each sentence builds on the one before it.

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: S5. It is the only sentence about the reader's own address, and everything the letter later asks of that reader follows from the line's material being unverified.
  2. Answer: "This" has no noun to point back to, so a reader must guess whether it means the rule, the deadline, or the replacement requirement. A rewrite is close to: "Meeting the ten-year replacement requirement has taken considerable planning here."
  3. Answer: Answers will vary. A strong rewrite folds the definition into S5, for example: "Your address on Feltham Street is served by a service line, the pipe that carries water from the main under the street into your home, and we could not verify its material from our records."
  4. Answer: S8. It should appear near the top of the letter, immediately after the reader learns that their own line is unverified, because everything else in the letter either explains that request or describes what happens after it.
  5. Answer: The figure tells a reader that the problem is national in scale, but it says nothing about their own street and gives them nothing to act on. A rewrite is close to: "Wrayburn's 386 known lead lines, and any of its 1,308 unverified lines that prove to be lead, are part of the roughly 4 million lead service lines the Environmental Protection Agency estimates are still in service nationwide."
  6. Answer: 1,308 service lines. S5 describes a line whose material could not be verified, which matches the inventory's unverified category.
  7. Answer: 626 service lines. Adding the 386 known lead lines to the 240 galvanized lines requiring replacement gives 626 confirmed lines needing action.
  8. Answer: No program has been named anywhere in the letter, so "described above" points at nothing. A rewrite is close to: "under the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements replacement requirement described in the first paragraph," or better, name the utility's own program once and refer to it by that name.
  9. Answer: S5, S6, S8, S9. The reader learns that their own line is unverified, then what a service line is, then what they are being asked to do, then what the sample they are collecting means. Accept S6 before S5 with a sound justification, since defining the term first is also a defensible order.
  10. Answer: Answers will vary. A strong combination is: "Because your line's material is unverified, we are asking you to use the enclosed kit to collect water that has sat in your household pipes for at least six hours, which is called a first-draw sample."
  11. Answer: Answers will vary. A workable topic sentence is: "Here is what happens after you return your sample." It must name the paragraph's subject, which is the sequence of steps the department will take, rather than repeating the request itself.
  12. Answer: Answers will vary. A proficient paragraph opens with the reader's own line, states the request, and then gives the reason, for example: "Our records do not show what your Feltham Street service line is made of. We are asking you to collect a first-draw water sample with the enclosed kit. Yours is one of 1,308 lines in Wrayburn whose material we still need to confirm." Reject any opening that begins with federal rulemaking or with the national figure.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the twelve sentences of the fictional letter on separate strips so the reordering in items 1, 4, and 9 can be done by hand before it is written. Assign items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9, and provide the frame "A reader cannot use this sentence yet because ..." for item 5.

Extension

Ask students to rewrite the whole fictional letter for a second audience, the landlords who own several Feltham Street properties but do not live in them, and then list the three ordering decisions that change between the two versions and say what causes each change.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "inventory," "verify," "first-draw," and "referent," and post a short example of a pronoun with a clear referent beside one without. Allow items 6 and 7 to be answered with numbers alone, and let students mark the reordering in items 1, 4, and 9 by writing the sentence labels in sequence rather than in prose.

Extensions

Have students design a one-page version of the fictional letter that uses headings and a short table instead of continuous paragraphs, then write a memo of about 150 words to the department explaining which of their design choices would survive a requirement that the letter be readable aloud over the phone, and which would not.