Choosing and Repairing a Press Notice Before the Deadline
At 4 p.m. an inspector hands a constable two drafts of a press notice for the Sunday marathon and asks for one to go to the English and Odia dailies by 6 p.m.
Draft A: “The public is hereby informed that on account of the forthcoming marathon on Sunday, the road from Rajmahal Square to Kalinga Hospital will remain closed from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. All vehicles are requested to use the Jaydev Vihar bypass and to cooperate with the traffic police. Inconvenience caused is regretted.”
Draft B: “Due to marathon on Sunday, the road from Rajmahal Square to Kalinga Hospital will be closed from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m.. All vehicles is requested to divert through Jaydev Vihar bypass. Any inconvenience is regretted by traffic police who is trying their best to manage the situation. People are requested to not park on the road.”
The Odia translator has gone home sick, and the office has a standard bilingual notice template on file.
1. Which draft goes to the press, and why? Identify three specific defects in the rejected draft and one weakness in the chosen one.
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Draft A is sent. It is grammatical, it names the closure window and the diversion, and it limits itself to the two things a notice must do: inform and request.
Three defects in Draft B:
- “All vehicles is requested” - subject–verb agreement. “Vehicles” is plural: “All vehicles are requested”.
- “Due to marathon” - a countable singular noun needs a determiner: “Due to the marathon”. (Separately, “due to” is adjectival; “on account of” or “because of” is safer for a reason clause.)
- “regretted by traffic police who is trying their best” - “the traffic police” takes a plural verb in this sense (“who are trying”), and the relative clause dangles awkwardly. There is also the double full stop after “a.m..” and the split infinitive in “to not park”.
One weakness in Draft A: “Inconvenience caused is regretted” is elliptical officialese; “Any inconvenience caused is regretted” reads properly and is the formula used in the standard template.
Choosing on tone as well as grammar matters: Draft B's “trying their best to manage the situation” invites the reader to conclude that the police are not in control. A notice should not editorialise about its own competence.
2. Rewrite the chosen draft in no more than 50 words, keeping every operational detail and adding nothing that creates a new commitment.
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Model rewrite (46 words):
“The public is hereby informed that, on account of the marathon on Sunday, the road from Rajmahal Square to Kalinga Hospital will remain closed from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. All vehicles are requested to use the Jaydev Vihar bypass and to cooperate with the traffic police. Any inconvenience caused is regretted.”
What was kept, and why: the two place names (the closure limits), the day, the exact start and end times, and the named diversion. Those are the pieces a driver needs; drop any one and the notice generates phone calls to the control room.
What was cut or refused: nothing operational was dropped, but nothing was added either. No promise of “alternative parking”, no statement that “emergency vehicles will be allowed” unless the inspector confirms it in writing - a notice is a public representation, and a stranded ambulance is a liability question, not a public-relations one. The regret formula stays because it is standard and admits no fault.
Test before sending: can a driver who reads only this paragraph reach the bypass without asking anyone? If yes, the drafting is finished.
3. The Odia translator is unavailable and the deadline is two hours away. What do you send, and what do you refuse to do?
Read the worked answer
Send the English text to the English editions by 6 p.m. under the inspector's signature. Send the Odia version through the office's standard bilingual template, not through an improvised translation.
The reasoning, in order of risk:
- Odisha's reading public is overwhelmingly Odia-speaking. An English-only press release in the Odia dailies is not a valid public notice in practice, whatever its legal status. The Odia version matters more than the English one.
- The template already contains the vetted Odia sentences for closure, diversion, cooperation and regret. Only the place names, the day and the times change - four substitutions, all verifiable against the English text.
- What I refuse: machine translation, a translation by an untrained clerk, and any Odia wording the inspector cannot read back. A mistranslated road name sends traffic the wrong way, and there is no time to correct it after the editions are printed.
- Control step: the officer who inserts the names and times signs the Odia copy as “checked against English draft”, and a copy goes on the office file. If no Odia-literate officer is present, the Odia release waits for the morning edition rather than going out unverified - with the English release carrying a line that the Odia text follows.
The deadline is a constraint, not a licence. Late and correct beats on time and wrong.