The bakery notice: 直す or 直る?
Kenji works the evening shift at a small bakery that runs two ovens. On Tuesday the older oven stops heating, and the repair company can only come on Thursday morning. Until then the shop can bake just 40 loaves a day instead of its usual 70, and the owner has already promised 30 loaves to a hotel every morning. Kenji must post a notice for the six part-time staff. He writes three candidate sentences: 「木曜日までオーブンを直します」, 「木曜日までにオーブンが直ります」, and 「オーブンの故障を治します」. The owner glances at the notice and says only, 「だれがする動作か、スタッフに分かるようにして」.
1. Which of Kenji's three sentences should go on the notice, and why do the other two fail?
Read the worked answer
Use 「木曜日までにオーブンが直ります」. 直る is intransitive: the oven is the subject and simply changes into a working state - exactly what the staff need to know. 直す is transitive and names the person doing the repair; on the notice it reads as if the bakery staff will fix the oven themselves, which is false and also not their job. 治す uses the kanji for curing illness or injury, so it cannot describe a machine. Note also までに ('by Thursday') rather than まで, because the repair is a deadline, not a continuous state.
2. A colleague suggests changing the transitive version to 「業者がオーブンを直します」. Is this an improvement, and what should Kenji check before using it?
Read the worked answer
It fixes the agent problem: 業者が…直します clearly states that the repair company performs the action, so nobody misreads the notice as a staff task. But it answers a different question from the intransitive version. Staff care when the oven works again, not who turns the screwdriver. Check two things: whether the notice also needs the practical instruction for Wednesday and Thursday, and whether naming the company is appropriate on an internal notice. A common solution is to keep 直ります for the headline and add the company only in a small explanatory line.
3. Write the follow-up line that tells staff what to do while the oven is broken, using vocabulary appropriate for an internal notice.
Read the worked answer
Something like 「木曜日までは1台で焼きます。午前のパンは40斤までです」. The reasoning matters more than the wording: the sentence must convert the constraint (one oven, 40 loaves) into an instruction the shift workers can act on, and it must keep the hotel's 30-loaf promise visible, since that is the fixed number the staff cannot cut. Avoid 直す/直る here; the topic has shifted from repair to production. Keep the verb in ます form and the numbers in the same order as the notice header so the two lines read as one message.