Vetting a Draft Circular Before Release
An internal circular at a logistics firm, drafted by a junior manager, is being vetted before release. The opening paragraph reads:
(1) "Having reviewed the vendor's invoices for the quarter, the discrepancy was noticed by the accounts team." (2) "Neither the procurement head nor the finance officers were willing to sign the revised contract." (3) "The committee has decided to defer the matter, and they will announce its decision next week." (4) "The new routing software, which the IT team claims reduces processing time by 30%, have not yet been tested at full load."
The closing line reads: "The team reviewed less than 20 invoices between January to March."
The manager's defence is that every sentence is acceptable because "the meaning is clear to anyone in the department". The circular will go to external auditors and to two vendor firms, so the standard to apply is edited written English, not the writer's intention. The circular cannot be split into two documents and no sentence may be deleted outright; each faulty sentence must be repaired without changing its factual content.
1. Explain what makes sentence (1) faulty, and rewrite it in two defensible ways that keep the same facts.
Read the worked answer
The sentence opens with a participial phrase, "Having reviewed the vendor's invoices for the quarter". A participle of this kind attaches to the subject of the main clause, so grammatically it is the discrepancy that did the reviewing. That is the dangling-modifier error; the meaning is recoverable only because readers repair it themselves.
Repair 1 (active, participle kept): Having reviewed the vendor's invoices for the quarter, the accounts team noticed the discrepancy. The subject of the main clause is now the doer of the review.
Repair 2 (the doer named inside the opening phrase): After the accounts team reviewed the vendor's invoices for the quarter, a discrepancy was noticed. This keeps the passive main clause, which is appropriate if the circular does not want to single out who spotted it - but the agent must then appear in the subordinate clause.
A rewrite such as Having reviewed the invoices, a discrepancy was noticed merely repeats the fault in shorter form.
2. Exactly one of sentences (2), (3) and (4) is correct as written. Identify it, and state precisely what is wrong with each of the other two and how to fix it.
Read the worked answer
Sentence (2) is correct. With the correlative pair neither … nor, the verb agrees with the subject nearer to it; the nearer subject is the finance officers, plural, so were is right. (Some editors would recast the sentence to avoid the awkwardness, but it is not an error.)
Sentence (3) breaks on number and pronoun consistency. The committee is treated as a single body taking the singular verb has decided, but is then referred to as they and immediately afterwards as its. Pick one number and hold it: The committee has decided to defer the matter and will announce its decision next week.
Sentence (4) is a subject–verb agreement error. The subject is software, singular, so the verb must be has: …have not yet been tested becomes …has not yet been tested. The intervening relative clause about the IT team's claim does not change the subject.
3. Repair the closing line ("reviewed less than 20 invoices between January to March") and name the two rules you are applying.
Read the worked answer
Corrected: The team reviewed fewer than 20 invoices between January and March.
Rule one is countability. Invoices are discrete, countable items, so the comparative is fewer, not less. Less belongs with mass or aggregate nouns (less time, less money, less paper). Because the writer has a specific count in mind, fewer than 20 is the only acceptable form here.
Rule two is the fixed frame of between. Between takes and, not to: between January and March, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. From … to … is the alternative frame, so a corrected version could also read from January to March - but the two frames cannot be blended, which is what the draft does. Note that the repair changes neither the count nor the period; it changes only the grammar, which is exactly what the manager's "meaning is clear" defence cannot excuse in a document going to external auditors.