Editing a School Safety Notice Before Circulation
The District Education Officer must issue a notice to all headmasters of high schools about a two-day earthquake mock drill on 12 and 13 August. An assistant prepares the draft below, and the officer asks you to review it before it goes on the notice board and the office website.
Draft sentences: (i) 'All the headmasters of the district are hereby informed that a two-day mock drill will be conduct in every high school on 12 and 13 August.' (ii) 'Each school have to submit a report within 24 hours of the drill.' (iii) 'The students which have been selected for the demonstration should assemble at 9 a.m. in the school ground.' (iv) 'Headmasters should ensure that no student is leave in the classroom while the alarm rings.' (v) 'A team of observers from the block office will visit the schools and they will check the records.' (vi) 'Please treat this as most urgent and do the needful.'
The officer also wants a closing line that is firm but polite, and a version of (v) that cannot be misread.
1. Correct sentences (i) to (iv) and name the error in each.
Read the worked answer
- (i) 'will be conduct' -> 'will be conducted'. The passive is formed with be + past participle; 'conduct' is the base form. Corrected: '...a two-day mock drill will be conducted in every high school on 12 and 13 August.'
- (ii) 'Each school have' -> 'Each school has'. 'Each' is singular and takes a singular verb, whatever follows it. Corrected: 'Each school has to submit a report within 24 hours of the drill.'
- (iii) 'students which' -> 'students who'. 'Which' refers to things; 'who' refers to people. Corrected: 'The students who have been selected for the demonstration should assemble at 9 a.m. in the school ground.'
- (iv) 'is leave' -> 'is left'. Again a passive needing the past participle. Better still, replace the vague 'while the alarm rings' with 'when the alarm sounds'. Corrected: 'Headmasters should ensure that no student is left in the classroom when the alarm sounds.'
The pattern is the same in three of the four: a passive or a singular subject has been given the wrong verb form.
2. Rewrite (v) to remove ambiguity, and choose a better closing line than (vi).
Read the worked answer
In (v), 'they' has two possible referents: the observers or the headmasters. A notice must have one reading only. Rewrite: 'A team of observers from the block office will visit each school and will check the drill records.' Repeating the subject and naming the object removes the ambiguity; 'each school' also closes the loophole that only some schools might be visited.
For (vi), compare:
- A: 'Please treat this as most urgent and do the needful.'
- B: 'Please ensure compliance and submit the report by 6 p.m. on 14 August.'
Choose B. 'Do the needful' names no action and no deadline, and 'most urgent' is inflated language that appears in every circular, so it stops signalling urgency. B states the action, the authority ('ensure compliance') and the deadline, which is what a headmaster actually needs. Firmness comes from specificity, not from adjectives.
3. The officer wants the same notice sent as an SMS of not more than 25 words to about 900 headmasters. Draft it and justify what you kept and dropped.
Read the worked answer
Draft (21 words):
'High school headmasters: earthquake mock drill 12-13 August. Selected students assemble 9 a.m. Submit report within 24 hours. - DEO'
What was kept: the audience, the event, both dates, the assembly time and the reporting deadline. These are the only facts a headmaster must act on.
What was dropped: 'hereby informed', 'all the headmasters of the district' (replaced by the addressee label), the passive 'will be conducted', and the whole of 'treat this as most urgent and do the needful'. Honorific formulae consume the character limit without adding an instruction, and an SMS cannot carry a notice's legal preamble.
One caution: 25 words is a character budget, not a grammar licence. Keep 'submit report within 24 hours' as a complete instruction rather than 'report 24 h', so that a headmaster reading on a small screen does not mistake it for a reminder.