The Draft That Came Back
You must clear a 110-word draft note before it goes to the Director. A senior clerk has flagged five usages as errors and wants corrections before 4 p.m. The flagged sentences are: (i) 'One of the officers have not signed the register.' (ii) 'The data was verified twice, but the findings was not circulated.' (iii) 'The undersigned is senior than the section head.' (iv) 'Less staff were deployed on Monday than on Tuesday.' (v) 'The report, having been prepared in a hurry, the errors were overlooked.' The senior's covering remark reads: 'Also please remove the split infinitive in the last line - "to carefully verify" - it is bad English.' You have the file, the original attendance sheets, and 40 minutes.
1. Correct each of (i) to (v) and name the rule. Then state whether you should make the change the senior asks for in the covering remark.
Read the worked answer
(i) 'One of the officers has not signed the register.' The subject is one, singular. The plural officers sits inside a prepositional phrase and cannot govern the verb. This is the commonest agreement error in office drafting because the plural is nearer the verb than the subject is.
(ii) 'The data was verified twice, but the findings were not circulated.' Findings is plural and needs were. The first clause is not the error: data as a plural is defensible, but singular was is standard official usage and consistent within the sentence. Correcting the wrong clause here is worse than correcting nothing, because it makes the note look edited without being improved.
(iii) 'The undersigned is senior to the section head.' Latin-derived comparatives - senior, junior, superior, inferior, prior - take to, not than. Than belongs to ordinary comparison of adjectives.
(iv) 'Fewer staff were deployed on Monday than on Tuesday.' Staff is being counted as individuals here, so the count noun takes fewer; less belongs to mass quantities (less time, less water). Note that staff were is not itself wrong - a collective noun takes a plural verb when the members are meant individually.
(v) A dangling participle. Having been prepared in a hurry must attach to the subject of the main clause, which is currently the errors - so the sentence says the errors prepared the report. Rewrite either the participle or the subject.
On the covering remark: the advice is not a correction. A split infinitive is a matter of preference, not grammar, and standard official drafting guidance permits it. But the Director's office has expressed a preference, the recast costs nothing, and a note is not the place to win a point of style - so recast it anyway and keep the file moving.
2. Rewrite sentence (v) in two different ways and say which you would use in this note, and why.
Read the worked answer
Version A (subordinate clause first): 'As the report had been prepared in a hurry, certain errors were overlooked.'
Version B (two main clauses): 'The report was prepared in a hurry, and certain errors were overlooked.'
Choose Version A, for three reasons.
- It keeps the causal link explicit. Version B merely puts two facts side by side and invites the reader to infer causation - which, in a note explaining why a report is defective, is exactly the inference you want to be unambiguous about.
- It avoids a new ambiguity. Version B's second clause has no stated agent, so a reader may ask who overlooked the errors. Version A at least keeps the reason attached to the outcome, so the failure reads as an effect of haste rather than an unexplained lapse.
- It fixes the dangling participle without an awkward passive chain. A third option - 'Having been prepared in a hurry, the report contained errors' - is grammatical but shifts the subject to the report and leaves the reader wondering who prepared it, which is the question the note may later have to answer.
One caution worth flagging upward: certain errors is vaguer than a note should be. If the file and attendance sheets allow, replace it with the number or the type - 'three attendance columns were left blank' - because a specific statement is harder to dispute later than a general admission.