Editing the Road-Safety Workshop Notice
The section has to circulate a notice about a one-day road-safety workshop. The draft typed by a new assistant reads: 'All the staff members are hereby informed that a workshop on road safety will be organise on 12th March. The participants which are interested should submit there names to the undersigned latest by 5th March. Kindly revert back with any queries. The workshop will be conducted by Dr. Meera Rao, who has worked on highway safety for ten years, and will be held in the seminar hall at 10:30 am.' The officer has marked three things for attention: grammatical slips, one sentence whose meaning is genuinely ambiguous, and the phrase 'revert back', which the typist defends on the ground that it is used in every office note in the building. The notice must go out the same afternoon, so the corrections have to be made quickly and defended in a single pass.
1. List five corrections the draft needs, and name the rule or fault behind each in a few words.
Read the worked answer
| Draft | Correction | Fault |
|---|---|---|
| will be organise | will be organised | Passive requires the past participle, not the base form |
| The participants which | The participants who | Relative pronoun for persons is who; which is for things |
| submit there names | submit their names | Homophone confusion: there (place) vs their (possessive) |
| latest by 5th March | by / on or before 5th March | Latest already carries 'not later than'; latest by is redundant |
| revert back | reply / respond | Pleonasm, and revert means to return to a previous state, not to answer |
Two further tidyings, not errors of grammar but of house style: 'All the staff members' reads better as 'All staff members', and '10:30 am' should be set as '10:30 a.m.'. The tense and voice are otherwise consistent, so the notice can be fixed in one pass rather than rewritten.
2. The fourth sentence is genuinely ambiguous. Rewrite it and explain precisely which structural feature created the ambiguity.
Read the worked answer
Original: 'The workshop will be conducted by Dr. Meera Rao, who has worked on highway safety for ten years, and will be held in the seminar hall at 10:30 am.'
Rewrite: 'The workshop will be held in the seminar hall at 10:30 a.m. and will be conducted by Dr. Meera Rao, who has worked on highway safety for ten years.'
Diagnosis. The original coordinates two passive verbs, will be conducted and will be held, under one subject that is separated from the second verb by the relative clause. The nearest preceding noun is Dr. Meera Rao, so a reader can momentarily take 'will be held' as applying to the person rather than the workshop - as though Dr Rao were being held in the seminar hall. Placing the relative clause last, after both verbs, restores the workshop as the single subject of both.
An alternative fix is to split into two sentences: 'The workshop will be held in the seminar hall at 10:30 a.m. It will be conducted by Dr. Meera Rao, who has worked on highway safety for ten years.' For a short notice, two short sentences are usually safer than one long one.
3. The typist says 'revert back' is acceptable because every office note in the building uses it. How should the officer respond, and what is the practical rule for the notice?
Read the worked answer
Popularity inside one building is not the test for official correspondence; standard usage is, and here standard usage is clear on two counts.
- Meaning. In standard English revert means to return to a former state or to a previous owner, as in 'the land reverted to the state'. Using it to mean 'reply' is a local office convention that readers outside the department may misread.
- Redundancy. Even in the local sense, back adds nothing: revert already contains the idea of returning. Adding back makes the phrase pleonastic, like 'return back' or 'repeat again'.
Practical rule for this notice: write 'Please reply with any queries by 5th March' or 'Kindly respond to the undersigned with any queries'. Both are unambiguous, shorter and neutral in register.
The broader judgement call: a JSA should not silently 'improve' an officer's settled phrasing in a signed letter, but should flag it once. Where the wording is demonstrably non-standard and costs nothing to change, as here, correct it and note the correction in the margin so the officer can see what was changed and why.