Editing a Paragraph: Tense, Voice and Reported Speech
A Class 12 student, Simran, writes this paragraph in a grammar test: 'Last Monday, the principal announces that the school will remain closed. The students were told that they must assemble in the ground. A notice was put up by the office which said, "Bring your own water." When I reached, I was asked by a teacher that where is my identity card. I had reached the gate at 8 a.m. but the guard had already locked it.' The teacher marks three types of error: tense consistency in narration, unnecessary passive voice, and reported speech after 'asked'. Simran argues that her paragraph is correct because 'the notice is still on the board' and 'the teacher really asked me'. The teacher must explain the difference between the time of the event and the time of reporting, and why 'was asked by a teacher that where is' is not standard English. The class is preparing for the PSEB grammar section, where editing and sentence transformation carry 10 marks.
1. Correct the first two sentences and explain the tense rule you applied.
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Corrected: 'Last Monday, the principal announced that the school would remain closed. The students were told that they had to assemble in the ground.'
Reasoning: The time marker 'Last Monday' fixes the reporting verb in the past: 'announces' must become 'announced'. In indirect speech, when the reporting verb is past, the reported verb normally shifts back. 'Will remain' becomes 'would remain'; 'must assemble' becomes 'had to assemble' because the obligation is reported from a later viewpoint. Simran's point that the notice is still on the board is irrelevant here: the sentence reports what the principal said on Monday, not what the notice says now. If she wanted to report a present fact, she would need a present reporting verb and a different time frame. In an editing task, consistency of the narrative frame comes before the real-world persistence of the notice.
2. Rewrite 'A notice was put up by the office which said, "Bring your own water."' in active voice and then convert the quoted instruction to indirect speech.
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Active voice: 'The office put up a notice that said, "Bring your own water."'
Indirect speech: 'The office put up a notice instructing students to bring their own water.'
Reasoning: The passive 'was put up by the office' is not grammatically wrong, but it hides the agent at the start of the sentence and makes the relative clause 'which said' attach awkwardly. The active version gives the office responsibility and produces a cleaner subject-verb line. For the instruction, 'said' is weak because the quoted words are a command. The reporting verb should be 'instructed' or 'asked', and the imperative 'Bring' becomes 'to bring'. The pronoun 'your' must shift to 'their' if the notice is reported in the third person; if the writer keeps 'students', 'their own water' is the natural form. Quotation marks and the comma before the quote disappear in indirect speech.
3. Explain the error in 'I was asked by a teacher that where is my identity card' and give the corrected sentence.
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Corrected: 'A teacher asked me where my identity card was.'
Reasoning: Three things go wrong in Simran's sentence. First, the reporting verb 'asked' introduces a wh-question, so it cannot take 'that'; 'asked that' is used for requests, not for questions. Second, an embedded question keeps statement word order: 'where my identity card was', not 'where is my identity card'. Third, the passive 'I was asked by a teacher' is unnecessarily indirect, and the pronoun 'my' is correct only because the reported speaker is the same 'I'; if the sentence were reported in the third person, it would become 'his identity card'. The teacher can show the pattern: direct 'Where is your identity card?' → indirect 'The teacher asked me where my identity card was.' The question mark also disappears because the whole sentence is now a statement.