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Worksheet Grade 9 English Language Arts

Active and Passive Voice in the Halbrook Overfeed Report

A grade 9 ELA worksheet on voice and agency, using a fictional treatment plant's incident report in which passive sentences hide who changed a chlorine feed setting.

Objectives

  1. Students will identify the actor a passive sentence leaves out.
  2. Students will revise agentless passive sentences into active sentences that name the actor.
  3. Students will explain when the passive voice is a reasonable choice in a technical report.

Vocabulary

Key words: active voice, passive voice, agent, residual, incident report, feed rate

Teacher overview

An incident report has one job, which is to let a reader who was not there reconstruct what happened. The draft below comes from a fictional plant, and it fails at that job in a specific and common way: nearly every sentence is passive and agentless, so the events appear to have happened by themselves. This worksheet asks students to find the missing actors, rewrite the sentences that need an actor, and decide which passive sentence is actually well chosen. The last point matters, because a lesson that stops at "avoid the passive" leaves students with a rule that careful technical writing breaks regularly.

Active and Passive Voice in the Halbrook Overfeed Report — Grade 9 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Read the plant records and the draft report, then answer the questions.

Plant records for the night of April 8 (all details are fictional). The Halbrook Water Treatment Plant aims to send out finished water with a chlorine residual near 1.2 milligrams per liter. Idris Bramwell was the only operator on duty from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. The plant's meter showed the residual rising to 2.9 milligrams per liter early that morning. Federal rules cap the residual at 4.0 milligrams per liter, so the plant stayed within the limit, but the plant still files a report whenever a reading leaves its own target range.

Draft incident report.

Sentence A. "At approximately 2:15 a.m., an elevated chlorine residual was observed at the finished water sampling tap."

Sentence B. "The feed setting had been changed during the previous shift."

Sentence C. "It was determined that the pump had been left on the manual setting."

Sentence D. "Corrective action was taken and the residual was returned to the target range."

Sentence E. "Idris Bramwell reduced the feed rate and logged the change at 2:40 a.m."

Sentence F. "The finished water was sampled again at 3:15 a.m."

  1. Sentence A does not say who observed the reading. Using the plant records, name the person who must have observed it.
  2. Copy the words in Sentence E that name the actor.
  3. Rewrite Sentence C in the active voice so a reader knows who reached the conclusion.
  4. Rewrite Sentence D in the active voice, naming the actor and what that person did.
  5. Sentence B says the setting "had been changed." Explain what a supervisor still does not know after reading it.
  6. Sentence F is passive, yet it is a reasonable choice here. Explain why the passive works in that sentence.
  7. Rewrite Sentence A in the active voice in fifteen words or fewer.
  8. A reader could finish this draft believing the pump acted on its own. Name the sentence that most encourages that reading.
  9. Explain your reasoning: does the draft make it possible to tell whether a person made a mistake? Quote one sentence from the draft in your answer.
  10. Write one closing sentence for the report that states what the plant will do differently, naming the actor.

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: Idris Bramwell. The records show Bramwell was the only operator on duty from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., so no one else could have observed the reading at 2:15 a.m.
  2. Answer: "Idris Bramwell." Sentence E is the only sentence in the draft that opens with the actor and follows it with an active verb.
  3. Answer: Accept any active revision that supplies a plausible actor, such as "Bramwell found that the pump had been left on the manual setting." Some students will name the supervisor instead, which is acceptable if the sentence says so.
  4. Answer: Accept any active revision naming the actor and the action, such as "Bramwell lowered the feed rate and brought the residual back into the target range."
  5. Answer: A supervisor does not learn who changed the setting, or why. The sentence records that a change occurred without recording the decision behind it, so the same change could happen again.
  6. Answer: The actor in Sentence F does not matter to the reader, because sampling is a routine step any operator on duty would perform. The point of the sentence is the time and the fact that a second sample was taken.
  7. Answer: Accept any active revision of fifteen words or fewer, such as "At 2:15 a.m., Bramwell saw the chlorine residual climbing at the finished water tap."
  8. Answer: Sentence C. "The pump had been left on the manual setting" removes the person who left it there, so the equipment appears to be the only actor in the event.
  9. Answer: Accept any reasoned judgment that quotes a draft sentence. A strong answer says no, quoting Sentence B or Sentence C, and notes that the draft records a changed setting without naming who changed it.
  10. Answer: Accept any closing sentence with a named actor and a specific change, such as "The shift supervisor will check the feed setting at every shift change and initial the log."

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the six draft sentences with the verb phrase already underlined in each, plus a two-column chart headed "actor named" and "actor missing" to sort them before rewriting. Provide items 3, 4, and 7 as frames that supply the sentence opening and ask only for the verb and object.

Extension

Ask these students to rewrite the entire draft report as a five-sentence narrative in the active voice, then write one paragraph explaining which single revision does the most to make the event reconstructable and why.

ELL supports

Pre-teach active voice, passive voice, agent, residual, and feed rate with one short example sentence each, showing the same event written both ways. Provide a color-coded model that marks the actor, the verb, and the receiver of the action, and allow items 5, 6, and 9 to be answered orally to a partner before writing.

Extensions

Have students collect three passive sentences from a school announcement or a product warning label and sort them into the two categories this worksheet uses: passives that hide a responsible actor, and passives that reasonably leave out an actor nobody needs. Students then explain the sorting rule they applied in two sentences.