Editing the Welfare Notice
Your adjutant hands you a draft notice. It must be on the unit notice board by 16:00 and must also reach 140 families on the welfare list. The draft reads: 'All families are informed that the welfare meeting will be held on 12 March 2026 at 10 am morning in the unit hall. The commanding officer will address the families, he will also distribute the scholarship cheques. Families should bring their identity cards and informations about their children's school. Any family who cannot attend should inform the adjutant, he will arrange a home visit.' The adjutant says the Nepali original used 'तपाईंहरू', and that the commanding officer wants the English to read as firm instruction rather than a request. You have 90 minutes, no internet, and a style guide that says: plain English, active voice where possible, one idea per sentence. The last notice with a visible error produced three telephone calls asking whether the meeting had been cancelled.
1. Fix the four faults that most affect meaning or credibility, and quote your replacement for each.
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Selection rule: I fix what changes what a reader does, not everything a grammar book would flag.
- '10 am morning' - redundant, and vagueness about time is what generates phone calls. Replacement: 'at 10 am on 12 March 2026 in the unit hall.'
- Comma splice: 'The commanding officer will address the families, he will also distribute the scholarship cheques.' - two actions run together, and the reader cannot tell whether cheques are distributed at the meeting or afterwards. Replacement: two sentences, 'The commanding officer will address the families. He will then distribute the scholarship cheques.'
- 'informations' - not a countable noun in English; the error is visible to every reader and undermines the rest of the notice. Replacement: 'information about their children's school.'
- Ambiguous 'he' in 'he will arrange a home visit' - the nearest antecedent is the commanding officer, so the sentence accidentally promises a CO's personal visit. Replacement: 'The adjutant will arrange a home visit.'
I would also change 'Any family who' to 'Any family that', but I would not spend the 90 minutes on it - it changes no reader's action.
2. The Nepali used 'तपाईंहरू'. Decide between direct address ('Please bring...') and third person ('Families are to bring...'), and justify the choice against the commanding officer's instruction that the notice read as firm.
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Recommendation: third person with a modal that carries obligation, for example 'Families are to bring their identity cards,' with a single direct-address line for the action I most want ('Inform the adjutant by 10 March if you cannot attend').
Reasoning. English 'you' is not a neutral equivalent of 'तपाईंहरू': the Nepali form carries an honorific register that 'you' drops, so a direct English 'You must bring...' reads blunter to a Nepali-speaking family than the original did. The CO's instruction is about firmness of content, not about abruptness of tone. Third person keeps the notice in the register of a record - the version that could later be produced to show what families were told - without the hedging that 'we would be grateful if' would introduce.
The failure mode to avoid is mistaking politeness markers for weakness and over-correcting into a notice that sounds like a charge sheet. 'Families are to bring' is firm and impersonal; 'Families must bring or face consequences' is firm and hostile, and it is not what the CO asked for.
3. A sergeant proposes adding: 'Strict action will be taken against those who remain absent.' Argue for or against, with reference to what the notice is for.
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Against. The notice has one measurable job: get 140 families into a hall on 12 March, and route the ones who cannot come into the home-visit system. The sergeant's sentence works against both. A family that has a genuine reason to be absent now has an incentive to stay quiet rather than inform the unit, which disables the mechanism the notice exists to advertise. And the threat is unenforceable - no disciplinary authority attaches to a welfare meeting - so it spends credibility the unit will need the next time it issues a notice that matters.
The sergeant's underlying concern is real: absenteeism without notice wastes the CO's time and the scholarship budget. Meet it with a mechanism rather than a threat - a name, a number and a deadline: 'Families that cannot attend should inform the adjutant on [number] by 10 March so that a home visit can be arranged.' That converts an absence into information the unit can act on, which is the only outcome that helps anyone. If the CO still wants a warning, the honest place for it is a sentence about the scholarship deadline, not a threat of unspecified 'action'.