PTA Notice: One Proof to Fix Everything
The parent-teacher association must approve a 90-word notice for the spring newsletter before it goes to print on Thursday. The draft reads: 'The student council fundraiser begins at 6 pm in room 12 on the north side of the building, please arrive early. Its open to every family, and tickets are five dollars. Principal Ortega will speak, and the council will announce its new garden project. Bring your family's reusable bags; we will fill them with plants from the greenhouse on tuesdays.' The PTA secretary says the notice 'reads fine' and wants to approve it unchanged; the treasurer, who edits a trade magazine, counts at least five punctuation or capitalization problems but is unsure which are genuine rules and which are house style. The newsletter printer charges for a second proof, so the PTA gets one chance to correct the text.
1. Identify and repair the comma splice in the first sentence, offering two different repairs and saying which you would choose for a printed notice.
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The splice is '...north side of the building, please arrive early': two independent clauses joined by a comma alone. Repair A, a full stop: '...north side of the building. Please arrive early.' Repair B, comma plus conjunction: '..., so please arrive early.' Repair C, subordinate one clause: 'Because the fundraiser begins at 6 pm in Room 12..., please arrive early.' For a printed notice I would choose the full stop: notices are read in fragments, and a short imperative is more scannable than a causal construction. If you keep 'so,' check that the causality is real - arriving early is a sensible inference from a 6 pm start but is not stated. Do not 'fix' it by deleting the comma, which produces a run-on, and avoid a dash in formal copy.
2. Correct the apostrophe and capitalization problems and give the test a writer can apply to each.
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'Its open to every family' should be 'It's open to every family': substitute 'it is' and see whether the sentence still reads correctly, which it does; 'its' is the possessive. 'On tuesdays' should be 'on Tuesdays': days of the week are capitalized, and the plural takes no apostrophe because it is not possessive - 'Tuesday's' would mean belonging to Tuesday. 'Room 12' is capitalized when it names a specific room, so 'in Room 12.' 'North side' stays lowercase as a compass direction rather than a named region; 'the North' would be capitalized. 'Principal Ortega' is already correct, because a title is capitalized before a name and lowercase when standing alone ('the principal will speak'). These are rules, not preferences, so they belong in the one corrected proof.
3. The treasurer also flags 'student council' and 'five dollars.' Are these errors? Advise the PTA on where to spend its single correction.
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Neither is an error, but each has a consistency issue. 'Student Council' is capitalized when it is the formal name of a specific body and lowercase when generic; here it refers to the school's own council, so capitalizing is defensible - the real requirement is consistency, so capitalize both mentions or neither. 'Five dollars' is correct; write either 'five dollars' or '$5,' never '$5 dollars,' which is redundant. Many newsletters spell out numbers under ten, which supports 'five.' These are style calls, not rule violations. Advice: spend the single proof on the hard errors - the comma splice, 'Its' for 'It's,' 'tuesdays,' and 'Room 12' - and settle the style questions by writing a one-line house rule for the next issue.