Word ID Assessment Across the Content Areas
ELA

Word ID • Social Studies

When authors write about social studies and history, they arrange, interpret, and generalize from facts and events. They downplay people as agents and turn actions into things. As a result, social studies texts contain many passive verb forms (was founded, was destroyed). They are also characterized by a high degree of nominalization. In nominalization, a verb or an adjective is converted into a noun by the addition of a derivational suffix. For example, hard becomes hardship.