Editing a Council Bin-Collection Notice
A volunteer has drafted a notice for the council's website and noticeboards. The draft reads: 'Residents who's bins were not collected on Monday are asked to leave them out until 6pm. The council apologises to those residents who have been affected by the delay, and thanks them for their patience. Having reviewed the collection schedule, changes will be made to the route. Anyone leaving bins on the pavement after collection may be fined, which residents have complained about. The new schedule will ensure that less collections are missed and that crews can spend more time on each street.' The communications officer must return a corrected version by noon. She wants to fix the clear errors, resolve the ambiguities, and avoid changing the council's actual commitments.
1. Identify the two outright errors of Standard English in the draft and correct them. For each, explain the rule and say whether the correction is obligatory or a matter of style.
Read the worked answer
1. 'who's bins' → 'whose bins'. 'Who's' is a contraction of 'who is' or 'who has'; the possessive form of 'who' is 'whose'. The relative clause needs the possessive: 'residents whose bins were not collected'. This is obligatory in formal written English. The error is common because the contraction and the possessive sound identical, but the written forms are not interchangeable, and the mistake is conspicuous in a public notice.
2. 'less collections' → 'fewer collections'. 'Collections' is a plural countable noun, and Standard English uses 'fewer' with countable plurals and 'less' with uncountable quantities (less time, less noise). This is obligatory for a formal notice. It is true that 'less' with plurals is widespread in informal speech, and some editors tolerate it in casual copy, but a council notice is exactly the register where readers notice, and the sentence is otherwise formal.
A third point the officer might consider is 'apologises to those residents who have been affected'. It is grammatical but wordy; 'apologises to residents affected by the delay' is tighter. That is a style choice, not an error, and changing it does not alter the council's commitment.
2. The sentence 'Having reviewed the collection schedule, changes will be made to the route' is faulty. Explain the fault and give two acceptable revisions that keep the meaning.
Read the worked answer
The sentence opens with a participial phrase, 'Having reviewed the collection schedule'. By convention, the implied subject of such a phrase must be the subject of the main clause that follows. Here the main clause subject is 'changes', which produces the absurd reading that the changes reviewed the schedule.
The fault is a dangling (or misrelated) participle. The reader is briefly forced into an impossible interpretation before the real agent is supplied, and in a public notice that kind of stumble undermines trust in the message.
Two revisions:
- Make the council the subject: 'Having reviewed the collection schedule, the council will make changes to the route.'
- Convert the phrase into a clause: 'After the council reviewed the collection schedule, changes will be made to the route.'
A third option keeps the original shape but moves the phrase next to its agent: 'The council, having reviewed the collection schedule, will make changes to the route.' All three preserve the meaning; the choice is a matter of rhythm. The officer should not 'fix' it by deleting the phrase, because the review is the justification for the change and is part of what the notice needs to communicate.
3. The clause 'which residents have complained about' is ambiguous. Set out the competing readings and propose a revision that removes the ambiguity without changing what the council intends to say.
Read the worked answer
The relative clause 'which' can attach to more than one thing in the preceding text, and the reader has to guess.
Reading 1: complaints about the fines. Residents have complained that people are being fined for leaving bins out after collection. On this reading, the council is acknowledging criticism of a strict enforcement policy.
Reading 2: complaints about the bins. Residents have complained about bins being left on the pavement after collection, which is the problem the fine is meant to address. On this reading, the council is responding to a nuisance.
Reading 3 (less likely but possible): residents have complained about the whole preceding situation, including collection failures.
The two main readings point in opposite directions: one makes the council defensive about enforcement, the other makes it responsive to residents' complaints about waste on the street. Because the notice is a public commitment, the officer must decide which is true rather than split the difference.
If the intended meaning is Reading 2, the cleanest revision splits the sentence: 'Residents have complained about bins being left on the pavement after collection. Anyone who does so may be fined.' This puts the complaint and the consequence in a clear cause-and-effect order and removes the ambiguous 'which' entirely. If Reading 1 is intended, the notice should say so directly: 'Some residents have objected to these fines; the council will review how enforcement is applied.' The officer should confirm the intended meaning with the waste team before publishing, since the revision changes what the council appears to be promising.