Reading the Report Before Signing It
A sergeant must sign a two-page incident report written by a subordinate. The report concerns a disturbance at a barracks gate. Relevant sentences: (1) 'Os soldados estava no portão quando o veículo chegou.' (2) 'Não sabemos quem começou a confusão, mais o portão ficou danificado.' (3) 'O relatório foi escrito por mim e será entregue ao comandante amanhã.' The sergeant notices the grammatical problems but is in a hurry and considers signing anyway, since 'the facts are clear enough'.
1. Identify and correct the grammatical errors in sentences (1) and (2), naming each error type.
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Sentence (1): 'Os soldados estava' - subject–verb agreement error. The subject os soldados is third-person plural, so the verb must be estavam: «Os soldados estavam no portão quando o veículo chegou.»
Sentence (2): two problems.
- 'mais' used as a conjunction - this is a common confusion with mas. The adversative conjunction is mas: «…, mas o portão ficou danificado.»
- The comma before mas is correct and should be kept.
Sentence (3) is grammatically acceptable: passive with por (foi escrito por mim) and future (será entregue) are both correctly formed.
2. The sergeant wants to sign because 'the facts are clear enough'. Evaluate that reasoning.
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It is unsound. An official report is a record that will be relied on later by people who were not present. Errors are not cosmetic: an agreement error can make it unclear whether one soldier or several were at the gate, and a misused mais/mas can invert the meaning of a sentence - 'we do not know who started it, but the gate was damaged' asserts something quite different from a garbled 'more the gate was damaged'.
Signing certifies that the signer has read and stands behind the text. Signing a document one has noticed to be defective converts a subordinate's careless drafting into the sergeant's own endorsement. The correct action is to return it for correction, however inconvenient the timing.
3. Rewrite sentence (2) so that it is both grammatical and honest about what is and is not known.
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A defensible version: «Não sabemos quem iniciou a confusão, mas o portão ficou danificado.»
The rewrite keeps the two facts separate and correctly joined: ignorance of the cause, and the observed damage. It avoids implying a causal link the writer cannot support. If the writer wishes to be more precise about the damage, that detail belongs in a following sentence ('O portão apresenta danos no lado direito'), not smuggled into the same clause. The general rule: state what is known, state what is unknown, and do not let a conjunction suggest a connection that has not been established.