Choosing the Notice Before It Goes on the Board
You are teacher-in-charge of notices at a higher secondary school in Tezpur. The inter-house debate is on 12 September at 10:00 a.m. in the school auditorium; nominations close with house captains on 8 September. Three drafts reach your desk.
Draft 1: 'All students are informed that an inter-house debate will be held on 12 September at 10 a.m. in the school auditorium. One of the student of each house must report to the undersigned by 8 September. The topic is "Social media does more harm than good."'
Draft 2: 'This is to inform all students that an inter-house debate is being held on 12 September at 10:00 a.m. in the school auditorium. Students who is interested should submit their names to the house captain by 8 September. Topic: "Social media does more harm than good." Don't be late.'
Draft 3: 'All students are informed that an inter-house debate will be held on 12 September at 10:00 a.m. in the school auditorium. Each house shall nominate one speaker. Names should reach the undersigned through the house captain by 8 September. The topic is "Social media does more harm than good." - A. Baruah, Teacher-in-Charge'
1. Which draft would you issue, and exactly which errors disqualify the other two? Distinguish fatal errors from cosmetic ones.
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Issue Draft 3. It is correct, complete, and carries an issuing authority and a clear action.
Draft 1 contains one outright grammatical error: 'One of the student of each house' breaks the rule that one of is followed by a plural noun - it must be 'one of the students of each house'. Everything else in Draft 1 is serviceable but incomplete: it never says how many speakers a house may send, and it has no signature block, which on a notice board leaves readers with no one to approach. The agreement error is fatal; the missing signature is serious but fixable.
Draft 2 contains a fatal agreement error - 'Students who is interested' should be 'Students who are interested' - and one register fault, 'Don't be late', an empty, scolding imperative with a contraction that has no place in a formal notice. Draft 2 also drops the instruction to route names through the house captain to anyone specific.
Cosmetic differences - '10 a.m.' versus '10:00 a.m.', italics versus quotation marks around the topic - do not decide the choice.
2. Rewrite the faulty sentence of Draft 1 and state the rule being applied. Then explain, in structural terms, why 'Don't be late' must be removed from Draft 2 rather than softened.
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Rewritten sentence: 'One of the students of each house must report to the undersigned by 8 September.'
Rule: in the pattern one of + noun, the noun is plural because the person is one member of a set. The verb agrees with one, so it stays singular - 'one of the students must report', not 'must report' becoming plural or the noun becoming singular. The same pattern governs 'one of the boys is', 'one of the questions was'.
On 'Don't be late': the objection is structural, not a matter of tone that a kinder phrase would cure. A notice is an impersonal, dated record of an instruction, and its authority comes from the named signatory. A second-person imperative with a contraction addresses an unknown reader personally and, worse, carries no information: it states no time, no place and no consequence. Replace it with the content it is standing in for - a reporting time, or the consequence of late arrival - and attach it to the signature. Softening it to 'Please be punctual' merely makes an empty sentence polite.
3. Draft 3 uses 'Each house shall nominate one speaker.' Would you keep that wording? Defend your answer against the objection that 'shall' is old-fashioned.
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Keep it. 'Shall' in the third person expresses obligation imposed by an authority - here, the school instructing houses - which is precisely the relation the notice records. It is not decorative archaism; it is doing the same work as 'must' but from the issuing side rather than describing a necessity.
The objection confuses formality with fustiness. The test is whether a reader can act on the sentence unambiguously. 'Each house shall nominate one speaker' fixes who acts (the house), how many (one), what is produced (a speaker, not a list of interested names), and by when, via the next sentence. 'Each house should nominate one speaker' weakens obligation into advice; 'Each house can nominate' removes the requirement altogether. If a school preferred plain style, 'Each house must nominate one speaker' is an equally acceptable rewrite and equally clear. Both are defensible; 'Don't be late' is not.