Finalizing the Personal Data Sheet Notice
You are the newly assigned administrative officer of a 60-person district office. The HR unit sends you a draft notice for posting and asks you to finalize it before the close of day. The draft reads:
"All employees are reminded that the submission of the updated Personal Data Sheet is on or before March 15. Each employee must submit their form to the HR Unit, together with a photocopy of their government-issued ID. Employees who will fail to submit on time will be subjected to disciplinary action."
Your supervisor wants the notice posted as it is, saying the meaning is clear enough. You see three problems: a wordy prepositional phrase where a single time expression would do, a pronoun that does not agree with its antecedent, and a verb form that is incorrect after who. The notice must inform rather than threaten, and it must fit on one page for the bulletin board.
1. Identify the three defects precisely and give the corrected wording for each.
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1. Wordiness / wrong time expression. Draft: "is on or before March 15" Fix: "is due not later than March 15" - or simply "must be submitted by March 15." A deadline is a point in time, not a location, so the preposition on does not work here.
2. Pronoun agreement. Draft: "Each employee must submit their form" Fix: "Each employee must submit his or her form" - or, better, restructure to avoid the problem: "All employees must submit their forms."
3. Verb form after who. Draft: "Employees who will fail to submit" Fix: "Employees who fail to submit." The relative clause already looks forward to the consequence; adding will inside it is both unnecessary and ungrammatical in standard written English.
Also worth flagging: subjected to suggests being made to undergo something; the correct legal-administrative idiom is subject to.
2. Rewrite the whole notice in no more than 35 words without losing the deadline, the requirements, and the consequence.
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Model rewrite (33 words):
All employees must submit their updated Personal Data Sheet and a photocopy of a government-issued ID to the HR Unit not later than March 15. Late forms will be subject to disciplinary action.
Why this version works:
- One sentence carries all three requirements (who, what, where, when); the second carries only the consequence, so it lands cleanly.
- Not later than states the deadline without ambiguity about whether March 15 itself is included.
- Late forms makes the consequence attach to the document, which is what the office can actually verify, rather than to a person's fault.
- Subject to replaces subjected to.
- Nothing is lost: deadline (March 15), requirements (PDS + ID copy + HR Unit), consequence (disciplinary action) are all present.
3. Your supervisor insists on keeping "will be subjected to disciplinary action" because it "sounds stronger." What do you do, and what principle guides your answer?
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What to do: raise the point once, in writing, with the correction shown - not as a matter of taste but as a matter of correctness. Then let the supervisor decide, and keep the note on file.
The principle: a public office's written output is a record, not a mood. A stronger-sounding notice that contains an error can be attacked on the error and drags the employee into a dispute about the wording instead of the deadline. Correct grammar is not decoration; it is what makes the obligation enforceable and what protects the employee who receives it.
The line to hold: the substantive choice (how severe the consequence is) belongs to the supervisor. The correctness of the language does not - you are the officer who signs off on the text, and passing on a known error is not deference, it is negligence.
Poor answer: quietly changing the text after the supervisor has ruled.