Water for Schools
Menu

Project Grade 9 English Language Arts

Writing the Norling Water Reclamation Plant Explainer

A four-session grade 9 technical writing project producing a lobby explainer for a fictional reclamation plant, with defined terms, ordered steps, and an analogy.

Objectives

  1. Students will define a technical term at first use without breaking the flow of a sentence.
  2. Students will order a multi-stage process and mark the transition that carries a reader between stages.
  3. Students will write an analogy for a biological process and state plainly where the analogy stops working.

Vocabulary

Clarifier
A clarifier is a big round or rectangular tank where water sits calmly so solids can sink to the bottom and be scraped away. Treatment plants use clarifiers at more than one stage of cleaning.
Activated sludge
Activated sludge is a living brown mixture of helpful bacteria and other microbes that wastewater plants grow on purpose. The microbes clean the water by eating the waste in it.
Disinfection
Disinfection is the step that kills or disables germs in water so it is safe to drink. Water plants usually disinfect with chlorine, ultraviolet light, or ozone.

Also: reclamation, screening, appositive, caption

Teacher overview

This four-session project asks students to write the kind of document that hangs in the lobby of a water reclamation plant: a short explainer that a visiting sixth grader and a visiting county commissioner can both read. Although the plant is fictional, the writing problem is real, because the process runs on living organisms and most plain-language descriptions of it quietly turn the microbes into machinery. The misconception this project addresses is the belief that writing clearly means removing every technical term. Removing the terms leaves a reader unable to follow a plant tour or read a sign, so the work here is defining terms in place, at first use, without stopping the sentence.

Writing the Norling Water Reclamation Plant Explainer — Grade 9 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Driving question: How do you explain a process run by living organisms to a reader who has never heard of it, in four pages, without either talking down or losing them?

Scenario. The Norling Water Reclamation Facility is fictional. It cleans the town's used water and returns it to the Bramleigh River. The plant is opening a small visitor lobby, and the operations manager has asked your class to write the explainer that will hang there. Visitors will range from middle school field trips to county officials.

What the plant does, in the order it happens. Used water arrives through a large pipe. Bar screens catch rags and trash. A grit chamber lets sand settle out. In the primary clarifier, heavier solids sink and grease floats. The water then moves to an aeration tank, where blowers push air through it and a dense community of bacteria and other microorganisms feeds on the dissolved waste. In the secondary clarifier, those organisms settle into a blanket at the bottom. Most of that blanket is pumped back to the aeration tank, because the plant needs the organisms alive and working. The clear water above is filtered, disinfected, and released to the river under a state permit.

Constraints.

  • The explainer runs four pages and no more.
  • It defines ten terms at first use, inside the sentence, using an appositive or a short clause rather than a separate glossary box.
  • The process description runs in the order the water moves, and every stage connects to the next with a transition that names a reason or a sequence.
  • It contains exactly one analogy paragraph, and that paragraph ends with a sentence naming where the analogy stops being true.
  • It contains three captions. Each caption runs under thirty words and says something the picture cannot say by itself.
  • No sentence runs longer than twenty-five words.

Final deliverable. A four-page explainer, laid out on plain paper with headings and caption boxes marked, submitted to the fictional plant's operations manager, plus a one-paragraph note listing the two utility glossaries the team consulted and the wording it adopted.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, build the term list. Teams list every term a visitor would not know. They then find how two real utility websites define three of those terms, compare the wordings, and choose one for each. Output: a card for each of ten terms, carrying the chosen definition and the source it came from.
  2. Session 2, order the process and write the transitions. Teams write the process description in the order the water moves. Each stage must connect to the next with a transition that names a reason or a sequence, and the transition is underlined. Output: a full draft of the process section with every transition underlined.
  3. Session 3, write the analogy and name its limit. Teams draft one analogy paragraph for the aeration tank. They then write the closing sentence that names where the analogy fails, such as the fact that a filter does not reproduce, or that a machine does not die when it is fed the wrong thing. Output: one analogy paragraph ending in a stated limit.
  4. Session 4, captions, layout, and the read-aloud test. Teams write three captions, sketch the page layout, then read the whole explainer aloud to a partner from another team who has not seen the process. The partner marks every sentence they had to hear twice. Output: the final four-page explainer and the source note.

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

Rubric
Criterion Emerging Developing Proficient Advanced
Defining terms in place Terms appear undefined, or definitions sit outside the sentences Some terms are defined at first use, others are left to context All ten terms are defined at first use inside the sentence, using an appositive or short clause Definitions are placed so the sentence still reads naturally aloud, and no definition repeats a term with a harder synonym
Order and transitions Stages appear out of order or without connection The order is correct, yet transitions are mostly additive, such as "also" and "next" Every stage connects to the next with a transition naming a reason or a sequence Transitions carry the logic of the process, so a reader could predict the next stage before reading it
Analogy and its limit No analogy, or an analogy presented as literal truth An analogy appears, yet its limit is missing or vague One analogy paragraph ends with a specific sentence naming where the comparison stops working The stated limit corrects a misreading a visitor would plausibly have, and the paragraph is shorter for it
Captions and audience Captions restate what the picture shows, or are absent Captions add some information, yet exceed the length limit or address only one audience Three captions run under the word limit and each adds information the picture cannot carry Captions are written so a visitor who reads only the captions still leaves with the process in the right order

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the ten terms already listed, so Session 1 becomes comparing definitions rather than finding terms. Provide two model sentences that define a term with an appositive, and one that fails, and ask students to say which is which before drafting. Allow the process section to be drafted as a labeled sequence before it becomes paragraphs.

Extension

Ask these students to write a second version of the process section for a reader who already works in water, then to list every sentence that got shorter and explain why. They may also draft a short sign for the aeration tank walkway, under forty words, that works for a visitor who reads nothing else.

ELL supports

Pre-teach reclamation, clarifier, aeration, and disinfection with one labeled diagram of the plant in the order the water moves. Allow term cards to carry a first-language note beside the English definition. Provide sentence frames for the appositive pattern, such as "The grit chamber, a tank where sand settles out, sits after the screens."

Extensions

Ask students to compare their explainer with a real plant tour brochure or a utility's public web page describing the same process, and to mark one thing the professional document does better and one thing it leaves a reader guessing about. A short class discussion can then decide which of those choices came from limited space and which came from an assumption about the reader.