The Notice on Three Boards
The principal of a residential school has drafted this notice: "Students who have not submitted the medical fitness certificate by 20 June must report to the infirmary, which is mandatory for all boarders travelling on the 25 June excursion." The office assistant proposes a revision: "All boarders travelling on the 25 June excursion must submit the medical fitness certificate by 20 June and report to the infirmary." The notice is to go on three boards: the dormitory corridor, the school website, and a WhatsApp group of about 400 parents. Two parents have already asked whether the infirmary visit applies to day scholars, and one senior teacher insists the original wording is "perfectly clear as it stands".
1. Identify the grammatical faults in the principal's sentence, naming each fault and stating exactly what it leaves unclear.
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Fault 1 - dangling relative clause. In "...must report to the infirmary, which is mandatory for all boarders travelling on the 25 June excursion", the pronoun which has no single antecedent. It can be read as referring to (a) the infirmary, (b) the act of reporting, or (c) the whole preceding clause. Only reading (b) makes sense, and the writer has left the reader to find it.
Fault 2 - contradictory scope. The subject "Students who have not submitted the certificate by 20 June" is restrictive: it excludes students who did submit. The relative clause then says the obligation is "mandatory for all boarders". So the sentence simultaneously limits and universalises the duty. A boarder who submitted on 19 June cannot tell whether he must attend.
Fault 3 - missing information. No date, time or purpose is given for the infirmary visit, so even a correct reading yields no actionable instruction.
Note that none of these is a spelling or punctuation error; they are failures of reference and scope.
2. The teacher claims the original is perfectly clear. Assess that claim, and decide which version should go on each of the three channels.
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The claim confuses sentence-level intelligibility with communicative adequacy. To the teacher, who already knows the excursion rule, the sentence parses; to a parent reading it cold, it does not. Clarity is a property of text-in-context, not of text alone.
Channel test:
- Corridor board - read in about five seconds, while walking, with no prior sentence. Needs a short directive, condition first. The original fails.
- Website - the only channel where surrounding context can be supplied; either version works if a heading and a date line are added.
- WhatsApp group of 400 parents - the notice will be screenshotted and forwarded without the preceding conversation. It must survive de-contextualisation on its own, so a truncated fragment is fatal. The original fails worst here, which explains the two queries already received.
Verdict: the revision is structurally better on all three channels because it front-loads the condition ("All boarders travelling on 25 June") before the duty. It is not yet sufficient: it silently drops the purpose of the infirmary visit, so a reader still cannot see why two separate actions are demanded. The teacher's objection should be noted but not accepted.
3. Write a single replacement sentence of at most 30 words that carries both obligations, is unambiguous about who must act, and can stand alone on a corridor board.
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Candidate: "Every boarder going on the 25 June excursion must submit a medical fitness certificate by 20 June and visit the infirmary for the compulsory pre-trip check." (26 words.)
Why each element is doing work:
- Every boarder going on the 25 June excursion - one universal subject, no restrictive/universal clash, and the condition precedes the duty.
- must submit ... by 20 June - obligation plus deadline in one clause.
- and visit the infirmary for the compulsory pre-trip check - attaches the purpose to the visit, killing the dangling which, and tells the reader why.
Acceptable variants must keep three properties: a single quantified subject, the condition before the duty, and an explicit purpose for the infirmary visit. A rewrite that merely shortens the original while keeping which fails the test.