Editing a Project Report Abstract and a Covering Email Under Review
A final-year mechanical engineering student is preparing a two-page project report on induction hardening of mild-steel samples, plus a covering email to an external reviewer who will assess the work. The draft contains these sentences:
(i) 'The experiments was conducted using a 2 kW induction heater, and the samples is tested at 300, 400 and 500 °C.' (ii) 'Having heated the sample to 500 °C, the hardness was measured within 30 seconds.' (iii) 'The increase in hardness is due to the fact that the cooling rate was very fast.' (iv) "We didn't find any cracks, which was pretty good." (v) 'Kindly do the needful and revert at the earliest regarding the sample photographs.'
The reviewer returns the draft with a single comment: 'I can follow what you did, but the tone is inconsistent and in places the grammar makes the procedure ambiguous.' The student has one revision cycle and cannot re-run any experiments, so every correction must preserve the original meaning exactly, including the three test temperatures and the 30-second measurement window.
1. Correct the grammar of sentences (i)–(iv), naming the specific fault in each and confirming that no factual detail changes.
Read the worked answer
(i) 'The experiments were conducted using a 2 kW induction heater, and the samples were tested at 300, 400 and 500 °C.' Fault: subject–verb agreement. 'Experiments' and 'samples' are plural, so 'was' and 'is' must become 'were'. The tense must also be levelled to past, since the work is complete; 'is tested' additionally misrepresents a finished experiment as ongoing.
(ii) 'After the sample was heated to 500 °C, its hardness was measured within 30 seconds.' Fault: dangling participial modifier. In the original, the unspoken subject of 'having heated' is the student, but the main clause makes 'the hardness' the subject, so the sentence says the hardness did the heating. Converting to a full subordinate clause and naming 'its hardness' removes the ambiguity about what was measured.
(iii) 'The increase in hardness is caused by the high cooling rate.' Faults: the wordy 'due to the fact that' (three words doing the work of one conjunction) and the vague intensifier 'very'. Note that 'due to' strictly means 'attributable to'; 'caused by' avoids the disputed usage entirely.
(iv) 'No cracks were observed in the welds.' Faults: the contraction 'didn't', the informal evaluative 'pretty good', and the unattributed 'we'. Experimental findings belong in impersonal passive, and 'pretty good' is an opinion, not a result.
No number, temperature or timing changes in any rewrite.
2. Decide which of sentences (iii) and (v) belongs in the report and which in the email, and rewrite the email sentence in standard international English.
Read the worked answer
Sentence (iii) is report language: a causal claim about measured results, appropriate to the discussion section once tightened (as in the previous answer). Sentence (v) is email language - a request directed at the reader - and could never appear in the report body, where requests do not belong. Sentence (iv)'s contraction fits neither: conversational register is not acceptable in the report, and 'pretty good' is too vague for a reviewer.
The problem with (v) is not politeness but idiom. 'Do the needful' is a South Asian business formula that reads as opaque or archaic to most international reviewers, and 'revert' in standard English means to return to a previous state, not to reply; used for 'reply' it will genuinely puzzle a reader. The stacked 'kindly … at the earliest' also reads as pressure.
Rewrite: 'Please send the sample photographs by Friday 12 July so that I can include them in the final version of the report.'
This keeps the request, replaces both idioms with plain verbs, and converts the vague urgency into a date - which is what a reviewer can actually act on. Also state the action ('send'), not the abstraction ('do the needful').
3. Compress sentences (iii) and (iv) into one sentence of at most 25 words that keeps both findings, the causal claim and the impersonal register.
Read the worked answer
Model: 'Because the cooling rate was high, hardness increased, and no cracks were observed in the welds.' (15 words)
Reasoning behind the choices: the two findings are joined with 'and' because they are independent observations, while the causal link is carried by 'because' rather than by the wordy 'due to the fact that', which alone would consume four words for no added meaning. 'The cooling rate was high' replaces 'very fast': 'high' is the standard collocation for rate and the comparative 'very' adds emphasis, not information. 'No cracks were observed' keeps the impersonal passive and states the scope (in the welds) that the original left implicit - a compression that adds precision rather than losing it. 'Pretty good' is deleted entirely, since an evaluative comment is not a finding and the reviewer will form that judgement from the data.
What to avoid: compressing by dropping the causal link (writing 'hardness increased and no cracks were found') changes the meaning, because the original claim is explanatory. Under a 25-word limit, delete words, never propositions.