General Written Ability
General Written Ability tests your control of standard English in fire-service writing: incident narratives, memos, emails, and procedural notes. The exam emphasizes grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, and clarity, not literary flourish. A report that is vague or ungrammatical can obscure facts, so treat correctness as an operational skill.
Core rules
- Locate the true subject. Phrases such as 'along with', 'as well as', and 'together with' do not create a compound subject; they are parenthetical. 'And' does.
- Make verbs agree with the subject, not with a nearby noun: 'Each of the firefighters needs...' not 'need'.
- Keep tense consistent. Incident reports usually use past tense for completed actions and present tense for standing policy.
- Fix comma splices by using a period, semicolon, or conjunction. Do not join two complete sentences with only a comma.
- Place modifiers next to what they modify. 'While checking the hose, she noticed a leak' is clear; 'While checking the hose, a leak was noticed' dangles.
- Use apostrophes correctly: 'firefighter's' is singular possessive, 'firefighters'' is plural possessive, and 'firefighters' is simply plural.
- Prefer active, specific wording: 'The engine company advanced the line' beats 'The line was advanced by the engine company' when the actor matters.
Worked example
Choose the correct sentence: A 'The battalion chief, along with the company officers, were reviewing the report.' B 'The battalion chief, along with the company officers, was reviewing the report.' The subject is 'chief', singular. 'Along with the company officers' is a parenthetical phrase, not part of a compound subject, so B is correct. If the sentence read 'The chief and the company officers were reviewing', the plural verb would be correct because 'and' joins two subjects.
Traps that cost marks
- Being fooled by a noun between the subject and verb.
- Overcorrecting words such as 'staff' or 'crew' when the sentence clearly treats them as a single unit.
- Using a semicolon before a phrase that is not a complete sentence.
- Treating every long sentence as wrong; length alone is not an error.
- Confusing 'its' with 'it's' or plural nouns with possessives.