Vetting a draft routine order
A newly joined writer in the administrative office drafts a paragraph for a station routine order and passes it to the Tradesman Mate to vet before it goes to the Master Chief Petty Officer. The draft reads: (i) 'It is inform to all sailors that a medical examination will be conduct on 12 August.' (ii) 'All the sailors are requested to attended the sick bay at 0800 hours.' (iii) 'Neither the duty officer nor the sailors was present at the muster.' (iv) 'The delay is because of shortage of staff since three weeks.' (v) 'The reason of the delay is because the register was not maintain proper.' The Tradesman Mate is not a trained writer, but he has been told that the order must read correctly and formally, and that every change he makes must be defensible by a named grammatical rule, because the writer will otherwise revert the corrections. He has one hour before the order is signed.
1. Correct each of the five sentences and give the rule that justifies each correction.
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(i) 'It is inform … will be conduct' → 'All sailors are informed that a medical examination will be conducted on 12 August.' Rule: a passive verb needs a past participle (informed, conducted); the verb inform takes a direct object, so 'inform to all sailors' is wrong.
(ii) 'requested to attended' → 'requested to attend'. Rule: the infinitive marker to is followed by the base form of the verb.
(iii) 'Neither the duty officer nor the sailors was present' → 'were present'. Rule: with neither … nor the verb agrees with the subject nearer to it - here sailors, which is plural.
(iv) 'because of shortage of staff since three weeks' → 'owing to a shortage of staff for three weeks'. Rule: since marks a point of time, for marks a length of time; owing to is the safer phrase when the cause is a noun phrase.
(v) 'The reason of the delay is because the register was not maintain proper' → 'The reason for the delay is that the register was not maintained properly.' Rules: reason for, not reason of; 'the reason … because' is redundant; the passive needs maintained; an adverb (properly) modifies a verb, an adjective (proper) does not.
2. The writer says sentence (iii) should keep 'was' because the sentence 'feels singular' and because the duty officer comes first. Decide the point.
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The writer is wrong on both grounds. Order does not decide agreement in a neither … nor construction; the deciding factor is the number of the nearer subject. Rewriting the sentence to test it makes this plain: 'Neither the sailors nor the duty officer was present' is correct, and 'Neither the duty officer nor the sailors were present' is correct. The verb follows whichever subject sits closest to it.
If the writer wants to avoid the awkwardness altogether, the better fix is to recast: 'Neither the duty officer nor any of the sailors was present.' That is the correction to send up, with the reason noted in the margin so the point is settled once rather than argued at every muster.
3. Rewrite the whole paragraph as a formal notice of no more than 45 words, keeping only the facts that a sailor needs.
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Model notice: 'All sailors are informed that a medical examination will be conducted on 12 August. They are requested to report to the sick bay at 0800 hours. The delay in the muster was caused by a staff shortage and the improper maintenance of the register.'
Word count: 44 words, within the 45-word limit.
Why this version: the passive is completed correctly, the request is addressed in the second person, the two reasons for the delay are stated as facts rather than as an excuse-laden clause, and every piece of information a sailor must act on - date, place, time - survives the cut. The register problem is retained only because the Master Chief Petty Officer asked for the cause to be on record.