The Deadline Buried in a 47-Word Sentence
You are the communications coordinator at a 210-employee distribution center. A supervisor has sent you a 400-word email that will go to all 32 warehouse employees Thursday morning. It opens with this sentence:
"Employees who have not yet submitted their shift preferences by Friday at 5 p.m. which is the deadline that was announced in last month's memo will be assigned to the shifts that remain open after all other requests have been processed by the scheduling office."
Later, the draft reads: "After reviewing the schedule, several errors were found." A third line tells staff they must "complete the form, submitting it, and then to confirm by email." The supervisor wants the email to sound "professional but not stiff," and the shift-bid window closes Friday at 5 p.m. You have one hour to return edits before the email is scheduled to send.
1. Revise the opening sentence so a reader on a noisy warehouse floor grasps the deadline in one pass. Explain what you cut and why.
Read the worked answer
The original runs 47 words and hides the date inside a relative clause. A reader skimming on a phone will catch "Friday at 5 p.m." only if it appears early and appears once.
Revision: "Shift preferences are due Friday at 5 p.m. Anyone who misses the deadline will be assigned a shift from whatever remains after other requests are processed."
What I cut and why:
- "which is the deadline that was announced in last month's memo" - a nonrestrictive clause wedged between the subject ("Employees") and its verb ("will be assigned"). It repeats information staff already received and forces the reader to hold the sentence open across eleven words. Delete it. If a reminder is needed, give it its own short sentence.
- "after all other requests have been processed by the scheduling office" - passive, and the office is already understood as the processor. Name it once elsewhere if it matters.
- Split the sentence in two. The deadline and the consequence are separate ideas, and the consequence is the one that changes behavior.
2. A reader complained last year about the sentence "After reviewing the schedule, several errors were found." Fix it, name the error, and say why your version is better for this audience.
Read the worked answer
The error is a dangling modifier (a misplaced participial phrase). The opening phrase promises that its actor will be the subject of the main clause. Here the subject is "several errors," which cannot review anything - so the sentence literally says the errors did the reviewing.
Fix by naming the actor: "After reviewing the schedule, we found several errors."
A second option - "Several errors were found when the scheduling office reviewed the schedule" - is grammatical but longer and hides who is accountable.
Why the first is better here: this is an internal message where staff may need to contact someone about a wrong entry. Naming the reviewer does two jobs at once: it repairs the modifier and tells the reader who to call.
Watch out: "After reviewing the schedule, several errors were found by us" fixes nothing. The phrase still dangles because "several errors" is still the subject.
3. The line "Employees must complete the form, submitting it, and then to confirm by email" is meant to be a three-step instruction. Repair it and explain the principle you applied.
Read the worked answer
The list mixes three grammatical forms: a bare verb ("complete"), a participle ("submitting"), and an infinitive ("to confirm"). Items in a series should share one form.
Option A: "Employees must complete the form, submit it, and confirm by email." Option B: "Employees must (1) complete the form, (2) submit it, and (3) confirm by email."
Choose B for a deadline procedure, because the numbers let a reader check off steps and confirm the order - useful when the third step is the one people skip.
Principle: pick one pattern and hold it across every item. This error is almost never a knowledge gap; it happens when a writer edits a list one item at a time and loses track of the first item's shape. Read the series backwards to catch it.