Redrafting a Defective Office Memorandum

• Dangling participial modifier. 'Being a matter of utmost urgency' has no subject of its own; grammatically it attaches to 'all branch heads', producing the absurd reading that the branch heads are urgent. Correct: 'As the matter is of utmost urgency, all branch heads are requested to verify the documents of the candidates.'
• Subject-verb agreement with correlative conjunctions. In 'Neither the centre supervisor nor the invigilators was informed', the verb agrees with the nearer subject; 'invigilators' is plural, so it must be 'were informed'. Correct: 'Neither the centre supervisor nor the invigilators were informed of the revised timing.'
• Pronoun with no antecedent / faulty reference. 'The candidates ... he will be allowed to appear' attaches a singular masculine pronoun to a plural noun and leaves it unclear whether the provisional permission applies to all candidates or only to those whose documents were late. Correct: 'Candidates who applied for the post of Assistant Engineer but whose documents were submitted after the closing date will be allowed to appear provisionally, subject to verification.'

A fourth defect worth flagging is 'desirous to complete' (correctly 'desirous of completing', or simply 'wishes to complete') and the vague 'the same will be intimated later', where 'the same' has no identifiable referent.

Rewritten sentence: 'Candidates who applied for the post of Assistant Engineer but whose documents were submitted after the closing date will be allowed to appear provisionally, subject to verification.'

Three changes do the work. First, the two relative clauses are joined by 'but whose', so both conditions attach to the single head noun 'Candidates' and the intrusive resumptive pronoun 'he' disappears. Second, the subject 'Candidates' now governs one verb, 'will be allowed', so the permission has exactly one set of addressees. Third, 'provisionally, subject to verification' is kept next to the verb so that the concession and its condition cannot be read apart.

The original risk is practical, not pedantic. Read one way, every applicant is admitted provisionally and only late-document applicants are subject to verification; read another, only the late-document applicants may sit. If the Board later debars a candidate on the first reading, the debarment is challengeable on the memorandum's own wording, and the department has no answer because the drafting, not the decision, created the ambiguity. Note also that the editor can fix the grammar but cannot fix the policy: if the Board's actual intention is that only late-document candidates get provisional admission, the rewritten sentence is correct; if the intention is wider, the drafter must say so, because the redraft has now made the narrower reading explicit.

The proposal should be resisted in this form. 'Requested' and 'directed' are not synonyms of convenience: 'directed' asserts that the signatory has authority to command branch heads, and if the memorandum is issued by a section of equivalent or lower level, the word invites exactly the challenge the deputy secretary is trying to avoid. If the issuing officer genuinely holds that authority, 'directed' is defensible; otherwise the correct register is 'are requested to ensure' or 'are directed to ensure' only after the file has been routed through an officer competent to issue directions.

The penal rider is disproportionate for a routine verification task. A blanket threat of disciplinary action creates no enforceable standard, names no default, sets no compliance date and identifies no reporting officer, so in practice it will be ignored; if it is ever invoked, the officer proceeded against can legitimately ask which instruction, by which date, was breached. A better construction is a dated compliance requirement, a named nodal officer for the consolidated report, and an escalation clause - for example, that non-receipt by the due date will be reported to the appointing authority - which preserves the consequence without overstating it. The test to apply is whether the wording can be defended line by line before an appellate authority.