Vetting a Charge-Revision Notice: Grammar, Conflict and the 160-Character Wall
You are vetting a charge-revision notice that a branch will send to 12,000 customers by email and, in shortened form, by SMS. The draft reads: "Dear Customer, We wishes to inform you that from 1 April the charges for cheque clearing will be revised. Each cheque presented at the counter will now cost Rs 25, except for accounts maintained by senior citizens, which are exempt. If any customer has not received their passbook, they should collect it from the branch. The charges are applicable to all customers who has opted for the standard variant. Kindly note the above and cooperate." The branch manager wants the message "short and polite". The compliance officer insists that the effective date and every exemption must be visible in whatever the customer actually receives. The SMS gateway truncates at 160 characters. A senior citizen holding the standard variant has already complained once this year about being charged wrongly.
1. Identify the grammar faults in the draft, name the rule behind each, and rewrite the affected sentences so that no customer can misread who is exempt.
Read the worked answer
Three fixes are needed, and one of them is not really a grammar problem at all.
- "We wishes to inform you" - subject-verb agreement. The plural subject we takes the base form: "We wish to inform you".
- "all customers who has opted" - the relative pronoun who refers to the plural customers, so it takes have: "all customers who have opted".
- "except for accounts maintained by senior citizens, which are exempt" - the relative clause which are exempt can attach to accounts or to senior citizens. Both readings produce the same practical outcome here, but a customer scanning quickly cannot tell whether the exemption belongs to the account or the person, and a charges notice is exactly where that ambiguity turns into a complaint. Replace it with a flat sentence: "Accounts maintained by senior citizens are exempt."
Also drop "now", which contradicts "from 1 April": say "will cost Rs 25 from 1 April". And "If any customer has not received their passbook" mixes singular customer with plural their; "Customers who have not received their passbook should collect it from the branch" reads cleanly.
2. The last sentence says the charge applies to all standard-variant customers, while the third sentence exempts senior citizens. How do you resolve this and what wording do you use?
Read the worked answer
Taken literally, the two sentences contradict each other for exactly one group: a senior citizen whose account is on the standard variant, which is the person who has already complained. She satisfies both "exempt" and "applicable to all".
The drafting rule is that the specific overrides the general, but a customer should not have to know that rule. The notice has to state the precedence on its face. Two workable options:
- State the exemption after the general rule and make the override explicit: "The revised charge applies to all standard-variant accounts. Accounts maintained by senior citizens are exempt, including standard-variant accounts."
- Or carve the group out of the general sentence itself: "The revised charge applies to all standard-variant accounts other than those maintained by senior citizens."
The second is tighter and survives being read sentence by sentence, which is how SMS and email are actually read. Either way, tell the manager why the sentence cannot simply be left as drafted: the cost of a wrong charge is a refund, an apology and a possible complaint to a consumer forum, not just an awkward sentence.
3. The manager wants it short, compliance wants every exemption visible, and the SMS cuts off at 160 characters. Decide what goes into the SMS and what stays in the email, and justify the split.
Read the worked answer
The SMS has room for one fact and one exception, so it carries the two things a customer can be harmed by not knowing: the date and the amount.
Draft SMS (about 105 characters): "From 1 Apr, cheque clearing at counter costs Rs 25 per cheque. Sr-citizen accounts exempt. Details in email."
What earns its place: the effective date (otherwise people assume it is already live), the price (the actual decision), and the senior-citizen exemption (the one rule whose omission has already caused a complaint). Dear Customer and Kindly cooperate are dropped - they consume the character budget without transferring information, and the sender ID already identifies the bank.
What goes to email: the full notice, the passbook sentence, and the explanation of which variant the charge applies to. Compliance's demand is satisfied because its hard requirements - date and exemption - survive in the SMS; the qualifying detail sits one click away. Flag to the manager that the gateway limit should be tested against the actual template before the blast, since a truncated exemption sentence would be worse than no exemption sentence.