English Language - Vetting a Branch Circular Before It Goes on the Notice Board

1. 'All the employees … is hereby informed.' The verb agrees with the subject 'employees', not with 'All'. Correct: 'All the employees … are hereby informed.' A useful check is to invert the sentence - 'the employees are informed', never 'the employees is informed'.

2. 'the medical certificates which was submitted by them.' The relative pronoun 'which' refers to the plural 'certificates', so the verb must be plural. Correct: 'the medical certificates which were submitted by them.'

3. 'should be submitted afresh till the 15th of this month.' Two faults. 'Till' marks the end of a continuous period, but a submission is a single act with a deadline, so 'by the 15th' is required. And 'afresh' means from the beginning, which makes no sense for documents already filed; the intended meaning is a second submission, so use 'must be submitted again'. Correct: 'must be submitted again by the 15th of this month.'

Two further weaknesses are worth flagging even though only three were asked for: 'the salary will be deducted' should be 'a deduction will be made from the salary', and the closing sentence dangles - it is the administration, not the inconvenience, that regrets.

Model rewrite (49 words):

'All employees of the Branch Office are informed that the medical certificates already submitted for last month's leave must be submitted again by the 15th of this month. Leave for which no certificate is produced will be treated as unauthorised, and a deduction will be made from the salary. The administration regrets the inconvenience.'

Why this version works.

• Subject–verb agreement is repaired ('employees … are'), and the plural relative clause ('certificates … were') disappears because the passive is simplified.
• The deadline is unambiguous: by the 15th, not 'till the 15th'.
• The two consequences are stated as separate, parallel facts - unauthorised leave, then deduction from salary - instead of being chained with 'otherwise', which made it unclear which penalty followed which failure.
• 'Afresh' is replaced by 'again', matching the manager's actual instruction to produce the same certificates a second time.
• The regret is attributed to the administration, removing the dangling construction.
• Register stays impersonal and formal: no contractions, no 'kindly', no 'you must'.

The test is not whether readers can guess, but whether the wording fixes one meaning.

'Till the 15th' vs 'by the 15th'. 'Till' describes a period that continues up to a point, which is correct for something ongoing ('the counter will remain open till the 15th'). Submission is a completed act, so 'by' fixes the last permissible moment. The three earlier queries about the deadline are direct evidence that 'till' was read in two ways - some employees would reasonably have thought a submission on the 15th itself, or after it, was acceptable.

'Salary will be deducted' vs 'a deduction will be made from the salary'. The first is loose: a salary is not deducted, an amount is deducted from it. In a notice that creates a financial consequence, the passive with a clear agentless construction ('a deduction will be made') is both grammatical and safer, because it does not suggest the whole salary is at risk.

Advice. Keep both corrections. In a 40-person branch, a notice that generates queries has already failed; the cost of precision is four extra words, and the benefit is that the notice can be applied uniformly without argument.