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Common Core LiteracyGrades 9–10History & Social Studies

RH.9-10.5: How Structure Drives an Explanation

Also written as CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.5 · Cluster: Craft and Structure.

All 29 Grades 9–10 Literacy Standards

The Official Wording

Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.

Common Core State Standards, Grades 9-10, Reading: History & Social Studies · Read it at the source · Checked October 14, 2026

What RH.9-10.5 Means in Plain English

Ninth and tenth graders explain how a history text’s structure, like a strict timeline or a cause-and-effect chapter, drives its key points home. An account of the Berlin Airlift opens with a question and answers it month by month until its last line names why the blockade ended.

Middle school (RH.6-8.5) asked students to describe how a text presents information, in sequence, by comparison or by cause. Ninth and tenth grade ask what that structure accomplishes. In eleventh and twelfth grade (RH.11-12.5), students take apart complex primary sources sentence by sentence and section by section.

RH.9-10.5 I Can Statements

  • I can identify how a history text is organized.
  • I can explain how a text’s order emphasizes a key point.
  • I can show how structure builds an explanation of an outcome.

RH.9-10.5 Worked Example

The account opens with a question and answers it a little more each paragraph, and the weak answer only notices the dates.

Read the Story
When Soviet forces cut every road, rail line and canal into West Berlin on June 24, 1948, the city’s more than two million people had food for about a month and coal for little longer. The Western Allies faced a question no one had tried to answer: could a city be supplied entirely by air?In the first days, the answer looked like no. American and British planes delivered a few hundred tons a day, while officials estimated the city needed several thousand tons just to get by.Through the autumn, the airlift turned into a system. Planes flew in fixed corridors at fixed heights and landed every few minutes, and Berliners built a new airfield at Tegel, much of it by hand, in about three months.By spring, the daily totals had passed what anyone once thought possible. Over one day in mid-April 1949, in a push the crews called the Easter Parade, planes landed nearly 13,000 tons.Less than a month later, on May 12, 1949, Moscow lifted the blockade. It had been meant to starve the city into giving in. The airlift had made it pointless.
A short passage written for this page.
Question: How does the structure of the passage, from its opening question to its last three sentences, emphasize the key point and build an explanation of why the blockade ended?
Not Yet“The passage is in chronological order. It goes from June 1948 to May 1949 and tells what happened during the Berlin Airlift.”It labels the structure correctly and stops. It never says what the order does: how the opening question is answered paragraph by paragraph, how the rising numbers build, or why the blockade’s end sits right after the Easter Parade.
Meets the Standard“The passage opens with a question, ‘could a city be supplied entirely by air?’, and every paragraph after it answers that question at a later date. The first answer is ‘no’: a few hundred tons against the several thousand needed. Then the totals climb, through a ‘system’ of fixed corridors and a new airfield, to ‘nearly 13,000 tons’ in one day. Told in time order, the climb lets the reader watch the impossible become routine. The last paragraph places the blockade’s end ‘less than a month later,’ right after the Easter Parade, and closes with three short sentences, the last stating the explanation outright: ‘The airlift had made it pointless.’ The structure makes the airlift the reason the blockade ended. A reader would need other sources to learn whether talks between the powers played a part.”It ties each structural choice, the opening question, the rising totals, the placement of the ending and its short final sentence, to the explanation the text builds, and notices what that structure leaves out.
Question Stems to Use
What question or problem does the opening set up?How does each paragraph answer that question differently from the one before?Why might the author place these two events side by side?Which sentence is the shortest, and why is it where it is?What does the structure lead you to believe caused the outcome? What might it leave out?

Common Mistakes with RH.9-10.5

Naming the structure and stopping

“The text is in chronological order.”

Try this: Follow every structure label with a “which makes the reader” sentence that names the point the order drives home.

Skipping the opening and the ending

Summarizing the middle paragraphs and ignoring the question the text opens with

Try this: Have students copy the first and last sentences side by side and explain how the ending answers the opening.

Missing what placement implies

Not noticing that the blockade’s end comes right after the Easter Parade, as if one caused the other

Try this: Ask students which two events the text places next to each other and what that placement asks the reader to conclude.

Where RH.9-10.5 Fits

Comes BeforeRH.6-8.5Describe whether a text presents information in sequence, by comparison or by cause.
AlongsideRI.9-10.5Analyze how particular sentences, paragraphs or sections develop an author’s ideas.WHST.9-10.2Organize an explanation of a historical event so each part builds on the last.
Comes NextRH.11-12.5Analyze how the parts of a complex primary source contribute to the whole.

Practice RH.9-10.5

Quick Check

  1. What question does the passage open with?
  2. How did the daily deliveries change between the first days and April 1949?
  3. What does the placement of the last paragraph suggest about why the blockade ended?

RH.9-10.5: Other Names

RH.9-10.5CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.5

Common Core State Standards © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Official wording from the Common Core State Standards PDFs at corestandards.org, last checked October 14, 2026. The explanation, I can statements, example, mistakes and practice on this page are EMStudio’s own, written beside the official wording. They are not part of the standard.