Editing a Use-of-Force Summary Before the Lieutenant Sees It
Draft B, the summary paragraph of a use-of-force report, has not been edited. The lieutenant will return it if any sentence contains a grammatical error, and she requires past tense throughout the narrative except where speech is quoted. The underlying incident was a 22:10 traffic stop on Market Street; the driver was released without charges.
(1) Neither the two occupants or the driver was able to produce identification. (2) Approaching the vehicle, the odor of alcohol was immediately apparent. (3) The driver refused to exit, therefore I requested a supervisor. (4) My duties include securing the scene, to interview witnesses, and the completion of a use-of-force form. (5) The driver stated he had two beers, and he has not been drinking since noon.
You have fifteen minutes before the shift briefing.
1. For each sentence (1)-(5), name the error and give a corrected version the lieutenant would accept.
Read the worked answer
(1) Correlative conjunction. 'Neither ... or' should be 'neither ... nor.' Corrected: 'Neither the two occupants nor the driver was able to produce identification.' Watch the agreement trap: under 'nor,' the verb agrees with the nearer subject, so it is 'driver was,' not 'occupants were.'
(2) Dangling modifier. The introductory participial phrase must describe the subject of the main clause, but the odor was not doing the approaching. Corrected: 'As I approached the vehicle, the odor of alcohol was immediately apparent.'
(3) Comma splice. 'Therefore' is a conjunctive adverb, not a coordinating conjunction, so it cannot join two independent clauses with a comma. Corrected: 'The driver refused to exit; therefore, I requested a supervisor.'
(4) Faulty parallelism. Items in a series must share grammatical form. Corrected: 'My duties include securing the scene, interviewing witnesses, and completing a use-of-force form.'
(5) Tense shift and unclear attribution. Corrected: 'The driver stated that he had had two beers and had not drunk anything since noon.'
2. Which two sentences would a defense attorney most likely attack as ambiguous rather than merely ungrammatical, and what exactly is ambiguous in each?
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(2) is ambiguous about agency: as written, the sentence can be read as saying the odor approached the vehicle or that someone unstated did. A reader cannot tell who moved. The fix is to make the officer the subject of the opening clause.
(5) is ambiguous in two ways. First, the shift from 'stated' to 'has not been drinking' blurs whether the sobriety claim is the driver's assertion being reported or the officer's own conclusion asserted in the present tense. Second, 'since noon' leaves open what the driver meant by the cut-off - since noon that day, or since some earlier noon. In a report, tense does attribution work: staying in past tense keeps every claim visibly inside the driver's statement.
The lesson is that ambiguity, not just rule-breaking, is what gets a report challenged, because the reader cannot tell what the officer actually observed.
3. Rewrite sentence (5) twice - once as indirect reported speech and once as a direct quotation - and state which version the lieutenant's rule permits.
Read the worked answer
Indirect: 'The driver stated that he had had two beers and had not drunk anything since noon.'
Direct: 'The driver stated, "I had two beers and I haven't had anything to drink since noon."'
Both are acceptable under her rule, but for different reasons. The indirect version converts the driver's words into past tense, so the whole narrative stays in past tense as required. The direct version preserves the driver's present tense, which is permitted because the words are inside quotation marks - the exception she carved out. What is not permitted is the original sentence, which mixes the two modes: it reports the first claim indirectly and then leaves the second claim in a tense that belongs to neither quotation nor narrative.