Clearing a Public Notice Before Printing
The district office has drafted the following notice for a plot-allotment ballot and asked you to clear it before printing: 'The number of applications received from overseas Pakistanis have increased significantly since last year. Each applicant must submit their original documents and a self-attested copy. Neither the assistant director nor the clerks was available for comment. Applicants are advised to bring a pen, a photograph and to reach the office by 9 a.m. The office will remain open on Saturday, however no application will be entertained after 2 p.m. Only less than fifty applications were rejected last year.' The notice will be published in English in a national newspaper and translated into Urdu. The assistant director wants the text to be formal, brief and grammatically defensible. You have one hour and no access to the original file; you must rely on the sentences as drafted.
1. Identify every sentence in the draft that contains a subject-verb agreement error, correct it, and explain the rule that decides the verb form.
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Two sentences fail agreement. First, 'The number of applications ... have increased' must become has increased. The grammatical subject is 'the number', a singular head noun; the prepositional phrase 'of applications' does not change the number of the head. Contrast this with 'a number of applications have increased', where 'a number of' is a quantifier meaning 'several' and takes a plural verb. Second, 'Neither the assistant director nor the clerks was available' must become were available. With 'neither ... nor', standard formal usage applies the proximity rule: the verb agrees with the nearer subject, here the plural 'clerks'. Had the order been reversed ('Neither the clerks nor the assistant director was'), the singular verb would be correct. Both corrections preserve meaning and are defensible in a formal public notice.
2. Rewrite the sentence with faulty parallelism and the sentence containing 'however', preserving the original meaning and formal register.
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The parallelism problem is in 'to bring a pen, a photograph and to reach the office'. The conjunction 'and' is joining a noun phrase ('a photograph') to an infinitive ('to reach'), so the list is unbalanced. Rewrite: 'Applicants are advised to bring a pen and a photograph, and to reach the office by 9 a.m.' Now 'to bring' and 'to reach' are parallel infinitive phrases, and within the first phrase 'a pen' and 'a photograph' are parallel noun objects. The second problem is a comma splice: 'The office will remain open on Saturday, however no application ...' joins two independent clauses with only a comma. Rewrite: 'The office will remain open on Saturday; however, no application will be entertained after 2 p.m.' The semicolon separates the clauses, and 'however' is set off by a comma as a conjunctive adverb. A full stop before 'However' would also be correct.
3. The assistant director proposes changing 'their' to 'his' in the second sentence and changing 'fewer than fifty applications' to 'less than fifty applications'. Evaluate both proposals.
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Reject both as drafted, but for different reasons. 'Each applicant must submit their original documents' uses singular 'their', which is widely accepted as a gender-neutral pronoun but can be challenged in a formal legal-style notice. Replacing it with 'his' is worse: it is gender-specific and excludes women applicants. The cleanest edit is to recast the sentence in the plural: 'Applicants must submit their original documents and a self-attested copy.' On the second point, 'less than fifty applications' is common in speech, but formal edited English distinguishes count nouns from mass nouns: applications are countable, so 'fewer than fifty applications' is the safer choice. The original 'Only less than fifty' should therefore become 'Fewer than fifty applications were rejected last year.' The proposal to change to 'less' moves the notice away from formal standard usage.