Four Lines, Four Mechanical Decisions
You are finalizing a one-page announcement for a Friday all-staff meeting at a 140-person plant. The draft, written by a safety lead in a hurry, contains these lines:
- "The plant will be closed on friday, september 12 for the quarterly safety stand-down."
- "Employees should bring: safety glasses, gloves and a copy of their badge."
- "We have now logged 180 days without a lost time injury."
- "The refresher training is mandatory, however, it will be offered on three dates."
The plant manager's only instruction is: "Fix the grammar but don't change how it sounds." The announcement posts to the intranet at 4 p.m. today.
1. Correct lines 1 and 4. Explain each decision, including why you chose one repair for line 4 over the others available.
Read the worked answer
Line 1: "The plant will be closed on Friday, September 12, for the quarterly safety stand-down."
- Days and months are capitalized.
- The comma after "12" is doing real work: without it, the reader's eye attaches "for" to "12" and stumbles before recovering. The date is parenthetical inside the prepositional phrase, so it needs both commas.
Line 4: as written it is a comma splice - two independent clauses joined by a comma plus "however." The comma before "however" is the error, and adding a comma after it does not fix anything.
Three valid repairs:
- (a) "The refresher training is mandatory; however, it will be offered on three dates."
- (b) "The refresher training is mandatory. However, it will be offered on three dates."
- (c) "The refresher training is mandatory, but it will be offered on three dates."
Choose (c). The manager said not to change how it sounds; "but" keeps the spoken rhythm, and semicolons read as formal in a short intranet notice read on a phone. (b) is the safe second choice. Reserve (a) for documents where the register is already formal.
2. Correct lines 2 and 3. Explain the colon and hyphen decisions, and state how you kept number style consistent across the whole page.
Read the worked answer
Line 2: "Employees should bring safety glasses, gloves, and a copy of their badge."
- Drop the colon. A colon promises a list after a complete statement ("Employees should bring three items: ..."). Here the list is the object of "bring," so the colon interrupts the sentence rather than introducing it.
- Add the serial comma. Without it, "gloves and a copy of their badge" can momentarily read as a pair of items. Any list whose final item is multi-word is a candidate for the serial comma; what matters most is applying the same choice everywhere on the page.
Line 3: "We have now logged 180 days without a lost-time injury."
- Hyphenate "lost-time." It is a compound modifier sitting before a noun. Do not hyphenate it when it follows the noun: "an injury that cost lost time."
- Keep "180" as a numeral. It is a statistic the reader should absorb at a glance, and numerals are standard for ten and above in business writing.
Consistency check: since "three dates" in line 4 stays spelled out, the page now follows one threshold - words below ten, numerals at ten and above. If you decided to spell out "one hundred eighty," you would have to change it everywhere, and the stat would lose its punch.