Correcting a Unit Notice Under a Grammar-Only Rule
You are the duty clerk in a unit orderly room. At 1410 hours the adjutant hands you a handwritten draft notice and says it must be typed on plain paper and pinned to the notice board before 1600. The draft reads: “All personnel are informed that the quarterly inspection will be held on 12 March. Every officers and JCOs are required to report at the drill shed at 0800 hours. The files which is pending with the orderly room must be submitted before the inspection. Any one who will not attend will be dealt strictly.” The notice board has space for about 60 words. The adjutant will not be available again today, and office policy says a notice may be edited only for grammar, spelling and punctuation, not for content. A colleague offers to rewrite the whole notice in simpler English. You have a computer with a spell-checker but no access to the inspection file.
1. Identify the four grammatical errors in the draft and give the smallest correction for each. State the rule behind each correction in one sentence.
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- “Every officers and JCOs are” → “Every officer and JCO is.” Rule: every is distributive and takes a singular noun and singular verb, even when two categories are joined.
- “The files which is pending” → “The files which are pending” (or “The file which is pending”). Rule: a relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent, and files is plural, so the verb must be are.
- “Any one” → “Anyone.” Rule: the indefinite pronoun is written as one word; any one means one member of a group and is wrong in this sense.
- “will be dealt strictly” → “will be dealt with strictly.” Rule: the phrasal verb is deal with a person or matter; deal strictly is incomplete. An optional fifth edit is “who will not attend” → “who does not attend,” which is tighter in a formal notice, but it is a style choice rather than a clear error. All four corrections stay within the grammar-only policy.
2. The colleague proposes a full rewrite. Decide whether to accept the proposal, using the policy and time constraints, and explain the risk.
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Reject the full rewrite. The policy permits grammar, spelling and punctuation edits only, so a rewrite creates a real risk of changing a rule, a date or a penalty without the adjutant’s approval. The adjutant is unavailable, so any new wording cannot be authorised today. The draft is also intelligible: a rewrite is justified when the text cannot be understood or when the original is so far over the word limit that it cannot be fixed locally, and neither condition applies here. Time is a secondary but real factor: checking a fresh draft against the original takes longer than making four marked corrections. The lower-risk judgement is to make the minimum edits, keep a copy of the original, and note the changes on the file. A rewrite would be acceptable only if every rule were preserved word-for-word and the adjutant approved it in writing.
3. Rewrite the notice in no more than 55 words so that it keeps every rule in the original and remains formal. Give the word count.
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Notice: All personnel are informed that the quarterly inspection will be held on 12 March. Every officer and JCO is to report at the drill shed at 0800 hours. Files pending with the orderly room must be submitted before the inspection. Anyone who does not attend will be dealt with strictly.
Word count: 50 words. The four rules are preserved: the inspection date, the reporting place and time, the submission of pending files, and the consequence for absence. The tone remains formal, and no new rule has been added.