Choosing the Right Word in a Unit Notice: Four Near-Misses
Corporal Lin is drafting the English version of a notice for his unit's weekly English Corner. The Chinese draft was written by the education officer, and Lin's first English pass contains four choices he is unsure about: (1) The activity will be held / taken / made / given in the reading room every Thursday at 19:00. (2) Each member should bring / take / carry / fetch a notebook and a pen. (3) The wording is considerate / considerable / considering / considered towards recruits who have never attended before. (4) Attendance is optional / selective / alternative / elective for soldiers on night shift. His supervisor, a translator with twelve years' experience, says three items are wrong for reasons of collocation, transitivity or register rather than difficulty. Lin has thirty minutes, no dictionary, and a rule that the notice must be posted by 18:00.
1. Choose one word for each of (1)–(4) and give the single strongest reason for each choice - not a dictionary definition of the word you picked.
Read the worked answer
(1) held. Hold collocates with scheduled events (hold a meeting / a ceremony / an activity). Take works only intransitively here (the activity will take place), so will be taken fails. Make an activity is not English. Give collocates with a talk, lecture, performance or party, not with a neutral scheduled activity in a plain notice - it would suggest a one-off performance rather than a recurring slot.
(2) bring. The choice is deictic, not lexical: bring moves an object towards the place where the speaker/event is; take moves it away. Members are coming to the reading room, so the notebook travels towards the event. Carry says nothing about direction and adds effort. Fetch presupposes a round trip (see next task).
(3) considerate. It is the only adjective meaning 'thoughtful about other people's needs', and considerate towards is a normal collocation. Considerable means 'large' and would be absurd of wording. Considering is a preposition/conjunction. Considered means 'deliberate, carefully thought out' - it describes the wording's care, not its kindness to recruits.
(4) optional. Optional is the standard antonym of compulsory in rules and notices. Selective means 'choosing carefully' or 'affecting only a few'. Alternative needs a complement (an alternative to attendance). Elective belongs to courses and posts filled by election, not to attendance in a unit notice.
2. Explain why *fetch* in (2) is grammatically well formed but still wrong here, and say what the item is really testing.
Read the worked answer
Fetch is transitive, so fetch a notebook satisfies the syntax perfectly - a candidate who checks only the grammar will keep it. What fails is the meaning: fetch encodes a round trip, i.e. go to where the object is, pick it up, and come back. It presupposes that the notebook is somewhere else (in the barracks, in a locker) and that the person will return with it.
In the notice the notebook is expected to be in the member's possession on arrival at the reading room; there is no second location and no return leg. So fetch describes a different real-world situation, not a different style.
The item is testing whether the candidate understands the topographical/deictic component of motion verbs (bring / take / fetch / carry) rather than just transitivity. This is the kind of vocabulary question where all four options are real words of the right word class, and only the direction or presupposition separates them - exactly the case where a dictionary entry gives no help and the surrounding sentence must be modelled.
3. Lin wants to replace 'Attendance is optional for soldiers on night shift' with a sentence that tells those soldiers what to do. Write the replacement and justify your register choices.
Read the worked answer
Suggested replacement: 'Soldiers on night shift are not required to attend, but are welcome if duty permits.'
Justification:
- Optional is accurate but reads as indifference in a notice; the notice's job is to remove doubt, not to leave the decision hanging.
- not required to states the obligation precisely and keeps the modal force that a notice needs; may attend would be vaguer and need not attend slightly literary.
- if duty permits adds the condition that actually governs a night-shift soldier's evening, and it protects the sender: it is not an invitation to skip duty.
- The sentence stays in the plain, impersonal register of a notice (no please, no we hope), and it is short enough to survive being read once, at a board, at 18:00.
A weaker answer such as 'Night-shift soldiers can come if they want' changes register (conversational), drops the obligation contrast, and would be hard to defend if attendance records were later queried.