Comma Splice, Possessive Apostrophe, Semicolons in a Complex List, and Hyphenation
You are preparing a one-page notice for a building of 220 employees about a parking and relocation change. The draft was assembled from three emails, and the facilities coordinator has asked you to check punctuation and mechanics before it is printed on 2 May. Four lines are under review:
- 'The underground garage will be closed on Friday, employees should use Lot B.'
- 'Employees parking permits must be displayed on the dashboard.'
- 'The move affects three departments: Finance, which is on the second floor; Human Resources, which is on the third; and Communications, which is in the annex.'
- 'A well known consultant will review the new two year plan.'
The coordinator warns that the notice will be posted in both official languages and that consistency matters more than personal preference. She wants a short rationale for each change so the same errors are not repeated in the French version.
1. Lines 1 and 2: identify the mechanical problem in each, correct it, and explain the rule behind the correction.
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Line 1 is a comma splice. Two independent clauses - 'The underground garage will be closed on Friday' and 'employees should use Lot B' - are joined only by a comma. A comma cannot carry that grammatical load by itself. Fix with a semicolon, a period, or a comma plus a coordinating conjunction: 'The underground garage will be closed on Friday; employees should use Lot B.' The semicolon is the best fit here because the two statements are closely related instructions on one notice.
Line 2 needs a possessive. 'Employees parking permits' leaves the relationship unmarked. Because the permits belong to multiple employees, the possessive plural is 'Employees’ parking permits must be displayed on the dashboard.' The plural 'employees' already ends in -s, so the apostrophe follows the -s. If the notice referred to one employee, it would be 'employee’s'. Position of the apostrophe carries the meaning, so this is not a cosmetic detail on a notice that will be read quickly.
2. Line 3: explain why semicolons are used rather than commas, and what would go wrong if commas were used throughout.
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The semicolons separate items in a series whose items already contain commas. The list has three members - Finance, Human Resources, and Communications - and each is followed by a descriptive relative clause introduced by a comma. If ordinary commas were used throughout, the reader could not tell where one department's description ended and the next department began; 'Finance, which is on the second floor, Human Resources, which is on the third' reads as a single confused run.
Semicolons act as 'super-commas' and make the boundaries unambiguous. The colon after 'departments' is correct because it introduces the list. Keep the semicolons even if some readers find them heavy; the alternative is to restructure into separate sentences, which would be clearer but longer. Consistency matters across languages: if semicolons are used in the English version, the French version should use the equivalent structure permitted by French punctuation conventions rather than a literal copy. The principle is that the strongest separator available should mark the largest boundary.
3. Line 4: correct the hyphenation and explain the rule, including why 'two-year' stays singular.
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Two hyphenation issues. 'Well known' should be hyphenated when it precedes the noun it modifies: 'a well-known consultant'. The hyphen is dropped when the phrase follows the verb: 'The consultant is well known.' 'Two year' should be 'two-year' for the same reason: a compound modifier made of a number and a unit is hyphenated before the noun - 'a two-year plan', 'a six-month contract', 'a 40-hour week'.
Note also that 'two-year' stays singular: not 'two-years plan'. The hyphenated compound functions as a single adjective, and adjectives in English are not pluralized. The corrected line reads: 'A well-known consultant will review the new two-year plan.' The underlying rule is to hyphenate a compound adjective when it comes before the noun and could otherwise be misread, and not to hyphenate when it stands alone after the verb. Apply the same test to any similar phrase in the notice.