Priya's Cover Letter: Three Marked Sentences
Priya is drafting a paragraph of a cover letter for a night-shift dispatcher job. Her instructor marks three sentences and asks the class to review them:
“Having read the posting for the night-shift dispatcher position, my interest was immediate. I have spent three years at a call center where each of the fourteen dispatchers, including myself, handles more than a hundred calls a day. The call center has taught me two things: how to stay calm and to document a problem quickly. Neither the long hours nor the pressure discourages me; in fact, it sharpens my attention.”
During peer review, a classmate makes two claims: that sentence 2 is incorrect because “each” is followed by the plural “dispatchers,” so the verb should be “handle,” and that the punctuation in sentence 4 is wrong because a semicolon should never appear before “in fact.”
1. Sentence 1 is marked. Identify the problem, explain what causes it, and revise the sentence.
Read the worked answer
The problem: the opening phrase, “Having read the posting for the night-shift dispatcher position,” is a participial phrase. By position, it attaches to the subject of the main clause. The main clause is “my interest was immediate,” so the sentence literally says that my interest read the posting. That is a dangling modifier - the phrase and the subject it is supposed to describe are not connected.
The fix: put the person who did the reading into the subject slot.
- Revised: “Having read the posting for the night-shift dispatcher position, I was immediately interested.”
- Also acceptable: “When I read the posting for the night-shift dispatcher position, my interest was immediate.”
Why the second version works: turning the phrase into a full clause with its own subject (“I read”) removes the attachment problem entirely.
What does not work: simply moving the comma, or deleting the phrase. The detail is worth keeping - it shows Priya read carefully - so the sentence should be rebuilt around a subject that can actually perform the action.
2. Respond to the classmate's claim about sentence 2.
Read the worked answer
The classmate is wrong, and the error is a common one.
The rule: the subject of a verb is never the object of a preposition. In “each of the fourteen dispatchers,” the word dispatchers sits inside the prepositional phrase of the fourteen dispatchers, so it cannot be the subject. The subject is each, which is singular and takes a singular verb: each … handles.
The interrupting material: “including myself” is a parenthetical aside. Removing it makes the grammar plain - “each of the fourteen dispatchers handles more than a hundred calls a day.” Interrupting phrases do not change the number of the subject.
Useful comparison: “The fourteen dispatchers handle more than a hundred calls a day” is correct, because dispatchers is the subject there. Both versions are grammatical; they just have different subjects.
What to tell the classmate: the verb agrees with each, not with the nearest noun. Nearest-noun agreement is exactly the trap this sentence is built to test.
3. Sentence 3 contains a list. Explain what is wrong with it and give two acceptable repairs.
Read the worked answer
The problem is faulty parallelism, not the colon. After “two things,” the colon is correct: it introduces the list. But the two items must share the same grammatical form. As written, the items are “how to stay calm” (a how phrase) and “to document a problem quickly” (an infinitive with no how). The reader expects a second how phrase and does not get one.
Repair 1 - repeat the marker: “…two things: how to stay calm and how to document a problem quickly.”
Repair 2 - share one marker: “…two things: how to stay calm and document a problem quickly.” Here how to governs both verbs.
A third option: drop the colon and write “…taught me to stay calm and to document a problem quickly.”
What not to do: adding a comma between the two items does not fix anything, and neither does changing “quickly” to “quick,” which creates a new problem. The mismatch is structural, so the repair has to be structural too.