Deciding the Correct Verb Form in a School Notice
A student is writing a notice for the school noticeboard. Her draft reads: 'All students are requested to be attend the meeting held in the auditorium tomorrow. The principal will spoke about exam rules. Students must brought their admit cards. Anyone who will not come should inform the class captain.' Her teacher marks four errors but tells her the notice is otherwise clear and well organised. The student must correct the verbs without changing the meaning or the polite tone, and she must decide whether each verb needs a tense change, a form change, or no change at all.
1. Identify the four verb errors and explain the grammatical rule behind each correction.
Read the worked answer
- 'to be attend' → 'to attend'. After 'to' in an infinitive, the base form is used; 'be' is not needed because 'attend' is not passive here. 2) 'will spoke' → 'will speak'. After the modal 'will', the base form follows, not the past tense. 3) 'must brought' → 'must bring'. Modal 'must' also takes the base form. 4) 'who will not come' → 'who does not come'. In a defining relative clause about a future condition, the present simple is the natural form here; 'will' after 'who' is not strictly ungrammatical in all contexts but is awkward and inconsistent with the notice's conditional meaning. The corrected notice reads: 'All students are requested to attend the meeting held in the auditorium tomorrow. The principal will speak about exam rules. Students must bring their admit cards. Anyone who does not come should inform the class captain.'
2. The student wonders whether 'held' in 'the meeting held in the auditorium' is also an error. Advise her, and explain how a past participle can be correct without a tense verb.
Read the worked answer
'Held' is not an error. It is a past participle functioning as a reduced relative clause: 'the meeting [which will be] held in the auditorium'. The full clause would contain a passive verb, and the participle carries the passive meaning without repeating 'which will be'. The test is whether the participle can be expanded into a full relative clause with the same meaning - here it can, so it is acceptable. By contrast, 'spoke' cannot be expanded that way in 'will spoke', which is why it must change. The student should therefore keep 'held' and change only the four identified verbs. This distinction - participle as modifier versus finite verb after a modal - is exactly what the question tests.