CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1d

ELAGrades 11–12Text Types and Purposes

The Standard

Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

Teacher's field guide

What Students Need to Do: Students adjust wording, sentence structure, and source use to fit an academic field and audience. They remove slang, loaded language, and unsupported personal reactions while keeping their claim clear.
What Mastery Looks Like: A student can revise a casual or biased paragraph without weakening its main claim. Word choice, sentence structure, evidence, and citation style remain consistent with the subject and audience.
Common Misconceptions: Students may think formal writing requires long words, passive voice, or stiff sentences. They may confuse objectivity with avoiding a clear claim or assume every subject uses the same conventions.
How to Assess It: Exit ticket: Rewrite an informal, biased paragraph about school phone rules as a two-sentence policy analysis for a school board. Use precise language, neutral wording, and no slang.

Lesson moves

Give groups sentence strips from lab reports, literary analyses, and editorials; have them sort by discipline, then mark tone and style clues.
Ask students to compare two versions of a claim and explain which wording sounds more objective and why.
Play Tone Repair: teams replace slang, exaggeration, and personal attacks in sample sentences while preserving each original claim.
Have students revise a casual email into a formal request to a principal, employer, or city official.

Free download

A ready-to-print activity worksheet aligned to CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1d, with an answer key for the teacher on its own page. No account needed.

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Learning progression

If students are struggling here, check these first.

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