Correcting a Wing Notice Before Issue
The junior clerk of the Technical Wing has drafted the following notice for circulation on the wing's notice board: 'All the staffs of Technical Wing are hereby informed that a meeting will be held on 15 August 2025 at 1000 hrs in Conference Hall No. 2 regarding the forthcoming inspection. They should brought their identity cards and no one will be allowed without it. Kindly do the needful and oblige.' The wing commander has returned the draft with a note that it is not fit for issue in its present form, and that the corrected version must be short enough to fit the one-page notice board format, must carry a reference number and the issuing authority, and must be unambiguous about who is required to attend and what they must carry. The clerk has also been asked to state in writing why each change was made, because the same errors have appeared in three earlier notices.
1. Identify the grammatical and usage errors in the draft, and give the reason for each correction.
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- 'All the staffs' - 'staff' is a collective noun already plural in this sense; adding '-s' creates a double plural. Write 'All staff' or 'All members of staff'.
- 'They should brought' - a modal verb takes the base form, so 'should bring' (or, for a firm instruction, 'must bring'). 'Brought' is the past participle and cannot follow 'should'.
- 'no one will be allowed without it' - the pronoun 'it' has no clear antecedent; the nearest noun is the plural 'identity cards', so as written the sentence says nobody may enter without the whole set of cards. Write 'Members without their identity cards will not be admitted'.
- 'Kindly do the needful and oblige' - a commercial courtesy formula that does not state an action and has no place in an official notice; delete it, because the body already states what is required.
- Missing reference number, date, signature block and issuing authority - these are not grammar, but their absence is why the draft is unissuable.
2. Rewrite the notice as it should be issued, keeping the body to about 60 words and including the reference and authority.
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TECHNICAL WING - NOTICE Ref: TW/Adm/2025/07 Date: ___
A meeting on the forthcoming inspection will be held on 15 August 2025 at 1000 hrs in Conference Hall No. 2.
All members of Technical Wing are required to attend. Members must carry their identity cards; those without an identity card will not be admitted.
(Signature) Wing Commander, Technical Wing
Why this version works: the addressee is named in the first line of the body, the action required (attend, carry a card) is stated as an instruction rather than a request, the consequence of non-compliance is explicit, and the signature block makes the notice enforceable. The reference number allows the notice to be traced in the wing's file and quoted in later correspondence.
3. Should the phrase 'kindly do the needful' be retained in any form, and must the notice name the officer convening the meeting? Justify both choices.
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The phrase should be dropped. 'Do the needful' transfers the decision back to the reader without saying what is needed, which is precisely what an instruction cannot do; 'and oblige' belongs to commercial correspondence, not service notices. A reader who has never met the signatory must be able to act from the text alone. If a courteous closing is wanted, use a neutral line such as 'Please make it convenient to attend' or, better, no closing formula at all.
On the second point, the notice must carry the issuing authority (the wing commander, under a signature block) - without it the notice is unenforceable. The convening officer need not be named when the wing as a body convenes the meeting, but a point of contact with extension number should be given so that queries about the venue or timing do not come back to the orderly room.