Editing a Water-Shutdown Notice
The Block Development Office of a Haryana district must issue a public notice before a two-day water shutdown. A junior assistant has drafted the text below, and the Block Development Officer has asked you to check it before it goes to the press. The BDO's instructions are: do not change what we are promising, only make it correct and readable, and keep it to roughly the same length. Draft:
'All the residents of ward no. 7 are hereby informed that the water supply will be remain suspended on 14 and 15 July due to repair work of the main pipeline. Residents are requested to store water in advance and co-operate with the department. The department regret the inconvenience caused. For further enquiry, residents may contact the ward office between 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on working days. Kindly note that the tanker service will be available only in case of emergency and the same can be availed by contacting the helpline number given below. Anybody whom wishes to register a complaint may do so in writing.'
1. Identify the grammatical and usage errors in the draft and correct them, without altering any commitment made to the public.
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Five genuine errors, all fixable in place:
- 'will be remain suspended' - two auxiliaries with one main verb. Correct to 'will remain suspended'. This is a verb-form error, not a style choice.
- 'The department regret the inconvenience' - subject-verb agreement. Correct to 'regrets'.
- 'between 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.' - 'between' pairs with 'and'. Write 'between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.', or alternatively 'from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.'; mixing the two frames is the error.
- 'Anybody whom wishes to register a complaint' - 'who' is the subject of 'wishes'. Correct to 'Anybody who wishes'.
- 'only in case of emergency' - countable singular noun needs an article: 'in case of an emergency'.
Housekeeping, not grammar: 'ward no. 7' is better as 'Ward No. 7' in an official notice.
Nothing here changes the shutdown dates, the tanker promise or the enquiry channel, so the BDO's condition is met.
2. A senior clerk proposes replacing 'will remain suspended' with 'shall remain suspended' and 'requested' with 'earnestly requested'. Are these corrections the BDO should accept?
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Neither is a correction; both are register choices, and they should be judged separately.
- 'shall' for 'will'. For a future event in an official notice, 'will' is correct. 'Shall' is not wrong - Indian official and legal drafting often uses it for a binding commitment - but it carries an obligation or legal tone that a two-day water notice does not need. Accepting it is harmless; calling the original an error is not. The real error in that clause is 'be remain'.
- 'earnestly requested'. This adds no information. It is an intensifier, and intensifiers in public notices tend to read as either pleading or bureaucratic padding. The original 'are requested' is already polite and standard. Reject it.
Guidance to give the BDO: an edit should be accepted if it removes an error or ambiguity, and refused if it only changes the temperature of the sentence. On that test, fix 'be remain' and leave both the mood and the politeness of the draft alone.
3. To save space the BDO will delete one sentence. Which sentence is safest to remove, and what would be lost by removing a different one?
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Safest to delete: 'Anybody who wishes to register a complaint may do so in writing.'
Reasoning: the notice already gives the public a channel - the ward office between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and the helpline below. The complaint sentence adds a procedural option but makes no service promise, so removing it leaves every commitment intact.
What must not be deleted:
- The tanker sentence. It is a promise of service in an emergency and names the only way to obtain it. Deleting it would leave residents with no stated way to get water during the shutdown - exactly the kind of change the BDO forbade.
- The enquiry timing. It tells people when the office can actually be reached; without it the helpline reference is unanchored.
So the rule applied is: cut material that only describes procedure, keep material that states what the department will do. If the BDO wants a second cut, the phrase 'and the same can be availed by contacting the helpline number given below' can be compressed to 'by calling the helpline below' without losing the promise.