Festival Announcement: Tense, Agreement, and Clause Order
The school festival committee has drafted this sentence for the opening announcement: 'By the time the gates open at 9:00, the students will have been preparing the exhibits for three hours, and every class will have finished their display by noon.' Preparation begins at 6:00. There are 24 classes, and each class has a two-hour slot in the gym from 10:00. The committee wants the announcement to be accurate and formal. A student editor says the sentence is correct because 'will have been preparing' shows a long action and 'their' can refer to 'every class' in modern English. Another editor worries that 'every class ... their' is an agreement error and that the time sequence is unclear. The committee must decide whether to keep, revise, or split the sentence.
1. Is 'will have been preparing' appropriate? Explain the time relationship and whether the future perfect continuous is justified.
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Yes, it is justified if the sentence means that preparation starts at 6:00 and continues up to the 9:00 opening. At 9:00, the students will have been preparing for three hours. The future perfect continuous emphasizes duration up to a future point. The simple future, 'will prepare,' would not show that the action began before 9:00 and is still in progress at that time. The present perfect continuous, 'have been preparing,' would be wrong because the opening is in the future. However, the sentence is only correct if the 6:00 start is stated or understood; otherwise 'for three hours' has no anchor. The committee should keep the form but make the 6:00 start explicit elsewhere.
2. Decide whether 'every class ... their' is acceptable in formal exam English. Revise if needed and explain.
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In formal exam English, 'every class' is singular, so the possessive should be 'its': 'every class will have finished its display by noon.' 'Their' is common in informal usage as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, but examiners often treat 'every class ... their' as an agreement error because 'class' is a singular collective noun and the sentence is formal. The safer choice is 'its.' If the committee wants to avoid the issue, it can write 'all classes will have finished their displays,' which is plural and agrees naturally. The revision should match the register: formal announcement, so 'its' or 'all classes ... their.'
3. Split or revise the sentence to make the time sequence clear without changing the facts. Provide one revised version and explain the clause structure.
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One revision: 'Preparation begins at 6:00. By the time the gates open at 9:00, the students will have been preparing for three hours. Every class will have finished its display by noon.' This splits the original into three sentences. The first establishes the starting point. The second uses a time clause, 'By the time the gates open at 9:00,' plus the future perfect continuous to show duration up to that future point. The third is a simple future perfect clause showing completion before noon. Splitting removes the overloaded 'and' and makes each time relationship explicit. The facts-6:00 start, 9:00 opening, noon deadline-remain unchanged.