Editing the Festival Newsletter: Correct Only What Is Wrong
A third-year student is editing the English page of her school festival newsletter. Her teacher has flagged four sentences but warned her: 'Correct only what is actually wrong; do not fix sentences that are already grammatical.' The sentences are: (1) 'The number of visitors to the science booth have increased every year.' (2) 'Each of the third-year classes hold a display in the gym.' (3) 'Neither the student volunteers nor the teacher was told about the schedule change.' (4) 'By the time the festival ended, we have sold all 300 tickets.' The student must decide which sentences need correction, supply the corrections, and explain each decision in one or two lines that her teacher can check. She also has to respond to a classmate who suggests rewriting (1) as 'A number of visitors have increased every year.'
1. State which of the four sentences need correction, give the corrected forms, and explain each decision.
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(1) Needs correction: 'The number of visitors ... has increased.' The head of the subject is 'the number', a quantity, which is singular; 'of visitors' is a prepositional phrase and cannot be the subject.
(2) Needs correction: 'Each ... holds.' 'Each' is singular and takes a singular verb even when followed by 'of the third-year classes'.
(3) Is already correct as written. With 'neither ... nor', the verb agrees with the nearer subject, 'the teacher', so 'was' is right.
(4) Needs correction: 'By the time the festival ended, we had sold all 300 tickets.' 'By the time' plus a past event sets a reference point in the past, so the earlier action takes the past perfect 'had sold', not 'have sold'.
Note that (3) is the trap. A student who applies 'neither/nor is plural' mechanically will change a correct sentence, which is exactly what the teacher warned against.
2. The classmate suggests (1) be rewritten as 'A number of visitors have increased every year.' Explain why this is not an acceptable correction, even though 'have' sounds natural after 'a number of'.
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'A number of visitors' is a different subject. In 'a number of + plural noun', the phrase means 'several' and takes a plural verb: 'A number of visitors have complained' is fine. But here the verb is 'increase', and several visitors do not increase; the thing that increases is the number, the quantity.
So the rewrite produces a sentence whose grammar is defensible in the abstract but whose meaning is wrong: it says the visitors themselves grew or became more numerous as individuals, rather than that the count of visitors rose. The original subject is the quantity, so the original singular verb is the one to keep. The correction should be 'has increased', not a change of subject.
The general lesson: agreement questions are often really questions about identifying the head noun, so paraphrase the sentence before choosing a verb form.
3. For sentence (3), a style guide says 'were told' is also possible. Explain the disagreement and say what the exam expects.
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The disagreement is between two rules. The traditional prescriptive rule says that when 'neither ... nor' joins subjects of different number, the verb agrees with the nearer one - here 'the teacher', singular, giving 'was'. Some writers, especially in formal British usage, prefer a plural verb whenever any element of the compound subject is plural, on the grounds that the sentence concerns more than one person, giving 'were'. Both forms appear in edited prose.
In a Japanese university entrance exam, the expected answer is the proximity rule, so (3) is treated as correct as written and should not be changed. The safe exam strategy is not to alter a sentence when the only argument for altering it is a disputed style preference. The teacher's instruction to correct only what is actually wrong points the same way: knowing which rules are contested is part of the judgement being tested.