A Hurried Water-Supply Notice Due at the Newspaper by 5 p.m.
A draft public notice is placed before you for issue. It was written in a hurry by a section clerk and is to be pasted on the ward office board and sent to the local daily for translation and publication on 9 June. The draft reads:
'It is hereby informed to all the respected citizens that the water supply will be discontinue on 12th June from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. due to urgent repair works of the main pipeline near the bus stand. All are requested to kindly store the water as per their requirement. Sorry for the inconvenience caused. For more information, contact the ward office between working hours only.'
Your supervisor wants it published unchanged because 'the meaning is clear'. The notice must carry five things: the date, the timing, the reason, the affected area and the contact point. The daily's deadline for copy is 5 p.m. today.
1. Identify five errors in the draft, name the type of each, and give the corrected form. Do not rewrite the whole notice yet.
Read the worked answer
1. 'will be discontinue' - verb form (passive voice malformed). It needs the past participle: will be discontinued. As written it reads as a verb error and, worse, the truncated form invites a reader to think supply continues.
2. 'It is hereby informed to all the respected citizens' - wrong construction, and wordy. 'Inform' takes a direct object, not 'to'. Correct: All citizens are hereby informed that... This also removes the ceremonial 'respected', which is not wrong but adds nothing and delays the verb.
3. '12th June' - date style. In formal notice style: 12 June. The ordinal suffix is a habit from letter writing, not an error of meaning, but consistency across the office's notices is the point.
4. 'as per their requirement' - wordy and ambiguous. Requirement of what? Correct: as required or as per need. Four words become two and the ambiguity goes.
5. 'Sorry for the inconvenience caused' - register, and an incomplete phrase. 'Caused' is left dangling. In a civic notice the standard form is The inconvenience is regretted or We regret the inconvenience. 'Sorry' belongs to a conversation, not a public notice.
6. 'between working hours only' - wrong preposition. Correct: during working hours. The word 'only' can be dropped; it adds a brusque edge.
7. 'store the water' - article. Store water; mass nouns take no article here.
2. Rewrite the notice in no more than 55 words, keeping all five mandatory elements, and justify anything you dropped or added.
Read the worked answer
Suggested notice (51 words)
'All citizens are hereby informed that water supply in Ward 7 will be discontinued on 12 June from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. due to urgent repair of the main pipeline near the bus stand. Please store water as required. The inconvenience is regretted. For details, contact the ward office during working hours.'
What is retained, element by element
- Date: 12 June. Timing: 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Reason: urgent repair of the main pipeline near the bus stand. Affected area: Ward 7, bus-stand locality. Contact point: the ward office, during working hours.
What is dropped
- 'respected citizens' - courtesy that costs four words and carries no information.
- 'as per their requirement' - replaced by 'as required'.
- 'Sorry' - replaced by the standard 'The inconvenience is regretted'.
- 'only' after working hours.
What is added
- The ward number, because the published notice will sit in a paper read across the city and readers outside the ward need to know it does not concern them.
- 'Please', which costs one word and makes the request read as a request.
Check: the notice can be read aloud once and understood - that is the practical test for a board notice and a newspaper notice alike.
3. Your supervisor says the meaning is clear and wants it published unchanged. Make the case for correction in three points a busy officer would accept, and say which single correction matters most for public safety.
Read the worked answer
1. It will be republished or contradicted, which costs more than fixing it now. A notice that says supply 'will be discontinue' invites a second notice, a phone call to the newspaper, and a correction in the next edition. Correcting five words costs five minutes; a contradiction in print costs the office's credibility with the same readers it will need during the next shutdown.
2. The paper will translate it, and errors travel badly through translation. The notice goes to a Gujarati daily for translation. A garbled English sentence gives the translator a choice between literal rendering and guesswork. A clean sentence translates cleanly and the Gujarati reader gets the same facts as the English reader - which is the actual legal expectation for a public notice.
3. Errors in a notice are read as carelessness about the work itself. Readers who see a sloppy notice reasonably ask whether the pipeline repair will be equally sloppy. The notice is the only contact most residents will have with the department that day.
The single correction that matters most for public safety: the date and the timing block - '12 June from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.' must be unambiguous. A resident who stores water for the wrong day, or who reads 'between working hours' as an instruction about when to call, is the resident who has no water and no one to ask. Everything else in the notice is courtesy; this is the operational core.
How to put it to the supervisor: not 'this is wrong English' but 'this will cost us a second notice and a call from the newspaper'. Same correction, better argument.