Verbs that carry a verdict
Eight reporting verbs. Match each to the position it puts the writer in.
The same closure, four ways
A regional hospital has announced that its maternity unit will close overnight from September. Four texts about it. All four are composed for this lesson.
A · A news report
The trust confirmed on Thursday that the maternity unit at St Alban’s will close between 8pm and 8am from 1 September. It said the change was temporary and had been made on safety grounds, citing a shortage of overnight staff.
A spokesperson acknowledged that some patients would be transferred to Hensfield, twenty-two miles away, and stopped short of saying when overnight cover would resume. The regional midwifery association claimed that the trust had known about the staffing gap since January. The trust declined to comment on that.
B · A column
The word doing the work in Thursday’s announcement is "temporary". Nobody has said how long temporary is, and nobody has been asked to.
I do not think the trust is lying. I think it does not know, and that "temporary" is what institutions say when they do not know and would rather not say so. Twenty-two miles is not a distance; it is a decision about who is worth an ambulance at two in the morning, and it should be argued for out loud rather than announced in a paragraph about staffing.
C · The trust’s statement
Following a review of overnight staffing levels, a temporary change to the operating hours of the maternity unit at St Alban’s has been agreed. From 1 September, births will be supported at Hensfield between the hours of 8pm and 8am.
Patient safety remains the priority. The position will be kept under review and arrangements will be communicated to affected families in due course.
D · A correction, published the following week
An article on 12 August stated that the trust had known about the staffing shortage since January. This was reported as a claim by the regional midwifery association and should have been attributed as such in the headline.
The trust has since disclosed that a workforce report identifying the shortage was received in March. We are happy to make this clear.
Seven statements. Decide which text each is true of. A text may be the answer more than once.
A The news report
B The column
C The statement
D The correction
1. Contains no agent at all in its central sentence.
2. Reports a refusal to answer as information in itself.
3. Concedes an error of attribution rather than of fact.
4. Argues that a word is doing work nobody has examined.
5. Reveals a date that changes what an earlier claim was worth.
6. Explicitly declines to accuse anybody of dishonesty.
7. Marks one party’s account as unverified while reporting it.
Read C again. A temporary change … has been agreed. Agreed by whom? Births will be supported at Hensfield. By whom, and who decided? Not one sentence in that statement has a person in it, and every sentence is true.
That is the passive from Unit 22, in the one case where the two-question test comes out "yes, yes".
Says, and lets you conclude
Three ways a sentence can carry a claim it does not make
| Device | Example | What the reader concludes |
|---|---|---|
| The reporting verb | The trust conceded that… | It is true, and it cost them |
| The absent agent | A change has been agreed. | Nobody decided — which cannot be true |
| The unshifted tense | She said the unit is safe. | The writer is treating the claim as still standing |
Say it, don’t read it. Reporting verbs carry stress when the writer wants the reader to weigh them.
She SAID she’d resign — and has not. He CLAIMS he was misquoted — and the speaker doubts it. Unstressed, both verbs are neutral carriers; stressed, both become the point of the sentence.
Read the first paragraph of text A twice: once flat, once with confirmed, acknowledged and claimed stressed. The second reading has an opinion in it.
Four sentences have been removed from a fifth text. Put each one back where it belongs.
The trust has now published the workforce report it received in March. [1]
It sets out three options, of which the overnight closure is the cheapest and the only one that does not require recruitment. [2] That sentence does not appear in the August statement.
[3] A spokesperson said on Wednesday that the report had been "one input among several" and declined to say which of the others had recommended closure.
None of this establishes bad faith. [4] A decision described as a response to a staffing shortage turns out to have been one of three options, considered for five months, and chosen partly on cost.
Attribution, restored
Seven gaps. Choose the verb or form that matches the position described around it.
The trust that the closure was temporary, and that patients would have to travel. The midwifery association that the shortage had been known about since January; the trust to comment. A correction published later that the claim should have been attributed in the headline. The trust has since that a report identifying the shortage received in March.
Seven sentences. One error each — patterns, stance or attribution.
1. The trust denied to have known about the shortage.
2. The association accused the trust to hide the report.
3. The spokesperson admitted that the closure is the right decision. — this is the trust’s own position
4. The report revealed that the trust might have acted too slowly. — nothing is established
5. They apologised the delay.
6. The trust refused to comment on the claim. — in a news report
7. The minister said that she will review it, and that it was unacceptable.
Put the people back in
Task card · Pairs · 12 minutes · Writing then speaking
Rewrite text C — the trust’s statement — as four sentences of a news report, with every claim attributed.
Six minutes writing, six comparing with the pair beside you.
- Every passive with a hidden agent becomes an attributed claim: the trust said…, the board agreed…
- Choose a reporting verb for each and be ready to defend it.
- Mark the one place where you cannot attribute, because the statement genuinely does not say who.
- Then, in one sentence, say what a reader now knows that they did not know before.
What you are testing. Institutional English is not vague by accident. Restoring the agents is a two-minute exercise that turns four unobjectionable sentences into four claims that somebody would have to stand behind — which is exactly why the original was written the other way.
What the rewrite exposed
Two questions.
1. What happened to the length of the statement when you attributed everything?
2. Which sentence could not be attributed at all?
Three devices, one effect
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. How does a text carry a claim it never makes?
2. What does stressing a reporting verb do?
Next. The reporting verbs in full — what each one claims, and the pattern each one demands, which is not guessable from the meaning.