Repairing a Sentence in an Operations Order
A section chief asks you to clean up two sentences in a draft operations order before distribution. The first reads: 'Having reviewed the site survey and the fire marshal's report, the command post location was changed by the detail leader, and each of the assigned agents were notified that they should coordinate with local police, document their movements, and keeping radio contact at all times.' The second reads: 'Neither the advance team nor the protective detail were aware of the schedule change, which caused delays that affected their arrival.' The chief requires clean grammar, no change to the factual content, and a first sentence of 35 words or fewer.
1. Identify every grammatical defect in the first sentence and explain what each one does to the reader. Then give a corrected version of 35 words or fewer that preserves the facts.
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Defects:
- Dangling modifier. 'Having reviewed the site survey and the fire marshal's report' must describe the subject of the main clause. The main clause subject is 'the command post location,' which cannot review anything. The reader briefly assigns the review to the wrong actor.
- Weak passive with a displaced actor. 'was changed by the detail leader' buries the person who acted; combined with defect 1 it is ambiguous whether the detail leader or someone else did the reviewing.
- Subject-verb agreement. 'Each of the assigned agents' is singular; 'were notified' should be 'was notified.'
- Faulty parallelism. The series 'coordinate ... document ... and keeping' mixes bare infinitives with a participle. 'Keeping' should be 'keep.'
- Redundancy. 'should ... that they should' stacks two obligations; one verb carries the duty.
Corrected (35 words):
'After reviewing the site survey and fire marshal's report, the detail leader changed the command post location and told each agent to coordinate with local police, document movements, and keep radio contact at all times.'
The actor now owns the review, the agreement is singular, the series is parallel, and no fact has been added or dropped.
2. Fix the second sentence and explain the agreement rule that controls it. Then state what, if anything, is still ambiguous after the fix.
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Correction: 'Neither the advance team nor the protective detail was aware of the schedule change, which caused delays that affected their arrival.'
Rule: With 'neither ... nor,' the verb agrees with the nearer subject. 'Protective detail' is nearer and singular, so the verb is singular - 'was,' not 'were.' Writers often default to the plural because two entities are named, which is exactly the trap here.
Residual ambiguity the fix does not remove:
- 'Their' has no stated antecedent. It could refer to the advance team, the protective detail, or both. If the delays hit only one element, name it.
- 'Which' is loose. It may attach to 'the schedule change' or to the whole preceding clause. If the delay was caused by the change, say so directly.
A cleaner version: 'Neither the advance team nor the protective detail was aware of the schedule change. The change delayed both elements' arrival.' The rewrite trades elegance for an unambiguous antecedent - the right trade in an order that will be acted on under time pressure.
3. A colleague proposes fixing the first sentence by writing: 'The command post location was changed by the detail leader after he reviewed the site survey and the fire marshal's report, and all of the assigned agents were notified ...' Assess this proposal against the chief's constraints.
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It is grammatically sound but the weaker choice.
What it fixes: the dangling modifier is gone; 'he' now performs the review.
What it costs:
- A vague pronoun. 'He' has one plausible referent here, but orders are often read by people who lack context. Naming 'the detail leader' twice, or once with a clear second clause, is safer.
- Passive voice in an order. 'were notified' tells the reader what happened, not who is accountable. An operations order should assign action to a named role.
- 'All of the assigned agents' vs. 'each agent.' The colleague has silently changed the scope. 'All' is plural and forces 'were'; 'each' is singular and forces 'was.' Only one of these is faithful to the original wording.
Ruling: the colleague's version corrects the error but alters scope and hides the actor. Use the active revision instead, and if the draft genuinely means all agents collectively rather than each one individually, say so explicitly and adjust the verb - but do not make that change to solve a grammar problem.