Publishing a Boil-Water Notice in One Hour
A water utility must publish a boil-water notice within the hour. The draft, assembled quickly from a translated template, reads:
"Customers are reminded that their water supply may be interrupted for up to 48 hours. Residents whom have not yet received a printed notice should contact our office. Neither the boil-water advisory or the repair schedule have been finalized. Having flushed the lines, the water is safe to drink. Please do not use tap water for infant formula until further notice is issued by the department."
Two staff members propose different fixes. One wants a minimal correction of grammar only, keeping the sentence order. The other wants a full rewrite in plain language with the action moved to the top. The communications lead must choose one version for publication, knowing the notice will reach 40,000 households, some with limited literacy in English, and that it may be quoted later in a regulatory review.
1. Identify the defects, name the rule behind each, and state the practical risk each creates.
Read the worked answer
- "Residents whom have not yet received" - whom is the object form; here it is the subject of have received, so who. Risk: signals carelessness in an official notice and slightly impedes readers who parse case forms.
- "Neither the boil-water advisory or the repair schedule have been finalized" - the correlative is neither … nor, not neither … or; and with two singular subjects the verb is has been finalized (agreement with the nearer subject in formal usage). Risk: the sentence is meant to say nothing is confirmed, but as written it wobbles on both coordination and number.
- "Having flushed the lines, the water is safe to drink" - dangling participle. The implied subject of having flushed is the water, which cannot flush. Risk: the reader cannot tell whether flushing is something the utility has already done or something residents must do - opposite instructions, in a safety notice.
- "may be interrupted for up to 48 hours" - may hedges an operational fact the utility controls. Risk: residents cannot plan, and a regulator can read the hedge as uncertainty about the utility's own repair schedule.
2. Which approach should the lead choose - minimal correction or full rewrite? Justify, and rewrite the two most dangerous sentences.
Read the worked answer
Full rewrite. Minimal correction fixes the grammar but preserves a notice whose central instruction - boil the water - is buried after housekeeping, and which states safety unconditionally. For 40,000 households including readers with limited English, the ordering is not cosmetic: comprehension depends on the action appearing first and on the condition being attached to it in the same sentence. A regulator reading "the water is safe to drink" with no stated precondition will treat that as the utility's position.
Rewrites:
- "Boil all tap water before drinking, brushing teeth, or preparing infant formula until the department issues a further notice."
- "Staff have flushed the mains; the water is safe to drink only after boiling, as set out above."
If, in fact, no flushing has yet occurred, the second sentence must instead instruct residents to run the taps - the point is that the actor must be named.
3. A colleague argues the dangling participle is harmless because "readers will understand that the lines get flushed first." Respond.
Read the worked answer
The inference the colleague relies on is precisely the one the sentence leaves open, and the two candidates are not close: either the utility has flushed the mains, or residents must flush their own pipes. Those are opposite instructions with different consequences for someone making infant formula in the next hour. "Readers will understand" also assumes the reader has prior context the notice cannot assume - it is arriving cold in 40,000 households.
There is a second problem beyond comprehension. A dangling modifier does not merely read awkwardly; it grammatically assigns the action to the wrong subject, here the water. In a safety notice that may be quoted in a regulatory review, the published text is the utility's statement, and ambiguity in the text is not cured by what staff meant. The standard is whether the notice is unambiguous on its face, not whether a charitable reader could reconstruct it. Fix the subject, or the sentence should not run.