The 20-Minute Notice: Editing Before It Goes on the Loudspeaker
A sub-inspector must issue a public notice for a traffic diversion on 14 June, 06:00 to 22:00, along a festival route. The draft handed to him reads:
- 'The diversion will be remain in force from 06:00 hours to 22:00 hours on 14 June.'
- 'All heavy vehicles is advised to use the bypass road.'
- 'Nobody will not be allowed to park on the Grand Road.'
- 'The public is requested to cooperate with the police and they should avoid the route.'
- 'Vehicles coming from the north side going to the south will not be allowed except for the emergency vehicles.' The notice must be printed by 05:00 and also read aloud on a loudspeaker at the diversion point. The printer will accept only one final version. A constable suggests issuing the notice in Odia only, since most road users are local. The sub-inspector has twenty minutes.
1. Correct sentences 1 to 4 and name the fault in each.
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'will be remain' - two future markers stacked. Correct: 'The diversion will remain in force from 06:00 to 22:00 on 14 June.' Also drop 'hours' after both times; a notice read aloud should be short.
'All heavy vehicles is advised' - subject-verb agreement. 'All heavy vehicles' is plural. Correct: 'All heavy vehicles are advised to use the bypass road.' 'Are advised' is acceptable in an official notice; 'must use' is stronger and better here, since the purpose is compliance, not advice.
'Nobody will not be allowed' - double negative, which in formal English reverses the meaning. Correct: 'No one will be allowed to park on the Grand Road' or, shorter and clearer for a loudspeaker, 'Parking is prohibited on the Grand Road.'
'the police and they should avoid' - 'they' has two possible antecedents, the public or the police. Correct: 'The public is requested to cooperate with the police and to avoid the route.' Repeating the verb after 'and' removes the ambiguity.
In each case the test is not what sounds wrong but which rule is broken, because the printer's proof may need a one-line justification.
2. Rewrite sentence 5 to remove the ambiguity and explain the ordering principle you used.
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The original has a misplaced exemption: 'except for the emergency vehicles' can attach either to the vehicles coming from the north or to the prohibition itself, so a reader cannot tell whether ambulances are exempt or merely exempt from being counted as northbound traffic.
Rewrite: 'Vehicles travelling from north to south shall not use the Grand Road. Ambulances, fire tenders and police vehicles are exempt.'
Ordering principle: state the prohibition first, completely, then state the exemption in a separate sentence. Two reasons.
- Proximity: an exception placed at the end of a long noun phrase attaches to the nearest phrase, not to the rule. Separating the sentences removes the attachment question.
- Delivery: the notice is read aloud once. A listener gets one rule per sentence; a sentence with an embedded exception forces the listener to hold two ideas and usually loses the second one.
Naming the exempt categories (ambulance, fire, police) is also better than the general 'emergency vehicles', which leaves a listener guessing whether a doctor's car qualifies.
3. Should the notice be issued in Odia only, as the constable suggests? Decide and justify.
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No. Issue it bilingually, Odia first and English below.
The reasoning turns on the audience, not on sentiment. Sentence 2 addresses heavy vehicles on the bypass, and long-distance trucks on that road are frequently from outside the state; an Odia-only notice would be unreadable to exactly the road users most likely to be diverted wrongly. But the loudspeaker announcement at the diversion point reaches mostly local pedestrians and two-wheeler riders, for whom Odia is the effective language - reading an English sentence aloud to that group wastes the one chance the notice gets.
Practical solution: printed notice bilingual, Odia on top in larger type; loudspeaker script in Odia, with a single English sentence at the end for the truck traffic. Keep times and dates in figures, not words, so they survive translation.
The constable's instinct is half right - language should follow the audience - but the audience is not uniform, and a notice that reaches only one part of it will produce the very congestion the diversion is meant to prevent.