Introduction:

The water cycle is the movement of water between the Earth and the
atmosphere. You can think about the water cycle as having 4 major steps:
Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, and Collection. These 4 steps
include water at different forms, switching from liquid water to water vapor, or
the gas form of water, and back to liquid water.

Evaporation:
Alright, so let's use the puddle of water that was formed after it rained yesterday
as our example for this step. Today’s forecast is sunny and 80 F, Later that day,
you find the puddle gone! Where did it go? How did all the water just disappear?
This is the work of evaporation!

Let's start with the puddle of water and the sun. The warmth of the sun causes
the water in the puddle to heat up enough to rise into the sky, or the atmosphere,
and turn into water vapor, or the gas form of water. This water vapor can then
combine in the atmosphere and turn into clouds! But this process does not just
happen to puddles but any place where water is present. It can be a puddle, lake,
river, stream, pool, ocean, or even the cup of water that you left sitting outside on
a hot summer day this morning! Now, you might be asking: what happens to the
water that is now in the sky? This leads us to the next step of the water cycle:
Condensation!

Condensation:
Now the water from the puddle is in the atmosphere in the form of water vapor.
The cold air in the atmosphere causes the water vapor droplets to combine and
form clouds. Another way to make clouds is the steam that comes out of
volcanoes. The cool thing about this specific step is that these clouds can travel
by wind to any part of the Earth! So let’s say that you live in Michigan and the
puddle’s water that evaporated and turned into water vapor this morning can
eventually end up in California or even Australia! The water vapor then cools
down and becomes liquid water and is now ready to fall back onto the Earth.
There is also something really cool tat happens sometimes when the
temperatures are low or the pressure is high and that is sublimation! This is
when the ice skips the step of melting into a liquid and goes straight into turning
into water vapor. The diagram below shows the process of condensation. This
leads to our next step of the water cycle, which is Precipitation!
 Precipitation:
The water in the clouds is now in the form of a liquid and ready to fall back onto
the Earth. It can be in the forms of rain, snow, hail, or sleet. The water that falls
in cold climates turn into snow, ice, or become glaciers. This causes a change in
the form of water, turning a liquid water into a solid form like ice and glaciers.
Once the water is on the Earth, this leads to the next step: Collection!
 Collection:
This step has multiple different way of happening. The rainwater that falls from
the sky can fall directly into a body of water like lakes, rivers, streams, pools, and
oceans. It can also fall onto the soil and get sucked into the earth to then go into
the roots of plants and water them. The water can perform runoff and flow
downhill into a body of water. Some of the rainfall can be sucked into the ground
as infiltration and become groundwater. The water can also freeze in cold
climates, becoming ice. Transpiration is when liquid water turns into water
vapor from plants. The water absorbed into the soil goes into the roots of the
plant and up towards the leaves. The extra water in the leaves leaves through the
stomata, or very tiny openings on the surface of the leaves, as water vapor.

After collection, the water is then ready to be evaporated and the whole cycle
repeats again. As you can see, the water that you see on a daily basis is always
reused in different ways. The sun is the key point in the water cycle. It would
never happen if it were not for the presence of the sun to begin the evaporation
process. If you want to see how the water cycle works, the video below is perfect!
Next time you look at your pool or even the water that you are drinking, you
could think that that water is coming from a different country!
 Target Audience:
The target audience for this document are mainly middle school students,
specifically 6th graders. These 12 year-olds are just starting to learn about the
cycles that are included in our environment and one of the first ones they learn is
the water cycle. This document was written in a way that would appeal to 6th
graders and would be easy for them to understand. The design of this document
is also made to be more appealing to the students as there are colors and pictures
throughout the document.
 Glossary
Water Cycle - the movement of water between the earth and the atmosphere.
Atmosphere - a layer of gases that is around the earth and other planets
Evaporation - the process that is initiated by the sun and cause the water on
earth to turn from a liquid to its gas state, water vapor.
Condensation - The water vapor in the sky is turned into a liquid and combined
to form clouds.
Precipitation - The liquid form of water falls onto earth in the forms of rain,
snow, sleet, or hail.
Collection - the water that fell from the sky collects into bodies of water like
lakes, rivers, streams, pools, puddles, and oceans.
Runoff - when water flows downhill and into a body of water
Infiltration - when the water moves into the ground.
Sublimation- when the ice skips the step of melting into a liquid and goes
straight into turning into water vapor.
Transpiration - liquid water turns into water vapor from plants.
Stomata- very tiny openings on the surface of the leaves.
 Works Cited
Freedrinkingwater.com. 2021. The Water Cycle: A Guide For Student | APEC
Water. [online] Available at: <https://www.freedrinkingwater.com/
resource-water-cycle-student-guide.htm> [Accessed 11 March 2021].
The Water Cycle for Schools. (2021). Retrieved 11 March 2021, from https://
www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-cycle-
schools?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
(2021). Retrieved 11 March 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ncORPosDrjI&ab_channel=PeekabooKidz
 Reflection

Overall, the research and composing the Technical Definition and

Description went really well. I was able to easily find and understand the

information relating to my topic, the Water Cycle. I was able to understand the

Water Cycle to a greater degree and even refresh the information in my head.

While working through the project, I learned how to describe and explain more

throughly and to an audience that is fairly young. Explaining concepts to middle

school students takes a little bit more work as you have to figure out how to

explain everything in a way that will be easy to understand, fun, and engaging.

The use of pictures and videos seemed to be extremely important as well as

colors, so I made sure to insert that into my document. I really think the video

was a great addition in the document as even I enjoy watching videos instead of

reading something to learn about a concept. The video itself is fun and colorful as

well as informative.

In the beginning, I struggled with finding enough information to insert into

my document. I thought that I did not have enough information but I soon solved

that issue relatively quickly. If I had the chance to start the project over, I would

probably try to do it on a different application and make the document more

aesthetically pleasing. I struggled with Pages as I was not able to do as much

design as I wanted to. I was able to determine the target audience and develop

rhetorical strategies appropriate to those audience. Because my target audience

are middle school students, I had to make sure to make the information and the

document as fun and engaging as possible while remaining informative and easy
to understand. I was also able to employ appropriate research strategies with a

variety of resources and evaluate the resources used and the information

selected from them. I looked up the water cycle on multiple different websites to

gather as much information as possible and organized it in a way that was easy to

understand. I was then able to organize the information into the 4 steps of the

water cycle and explain with detail and provide examples to make the whole

process more understandable and easy to follow. I was able to add more details

into my writing, which was my first personal goal. I did not accomplish my second

personal goal, which was the use of analytical verbs, but I feel like it would not

belong in this type of document. I would still like to implement more analytical

verbs into my writing as well as more varied language.