posted
I'm still learning to write English well enough so readers will not constantly ask themselves: "Does this guy even know English?" In a story, I usually past simple (she said, etc.) but every so often I want to use past perfect. Someone on another forum has said that I shouldn't switch from one to another and just use one. But I don't know which one is better. I simply use the one I prefer at the moment. Some senteces sound better with perfect, others in simple.
posted
Can you clarify which tenses you are talking about with examples?
As I understand it: Simple past - "he walked" Past perfect - "he has walked" Pluperfect - "he had walked"
Past perfect by the definition above is not commonly used, although oddly it has grown as a conventional form of language used by soccer players in post-match interviews ("Yeah, he's passed the ball to Giggsy, and Giggsy's played it back in, and Wayne's come in at the back post and knocked it past teh keeper"). In fiction writing, simple past is very commonly used, and then pluperfect is used to indicate when things happened earlier than the past of the narrative itself. So if you are narrating about events in the evening, and then want to flash back to the prior morning, you would use the pluperfect to signal that - sometimes it's used just once at the start of a paragrph as a "flag", sometimes it's used throughout the events that are in the further past, though that can look clumsy in a long section of narrative.
"She looked up at the man and tried to keep from showing any expression. Only that morning she had seen the same face, the same glower; only then, it had been accompanied by hands drenched in blood." Simple past for when she is seeing him "now" (in the narrative moment): pluperfect for the reference to past with respect to that "now".
posted
I'm not sure if British English uses different terminology than American English, however, past perfect and pluperfect are the same thing in the U.S.
Here is the delineation of tenses:
Present - walks Past - walked Present Perfect - has/have walked Past Perfect - had walked Future - will walk Future Perfect - will have walked
There is also a Progressive form of these tenses that uses "-ing".
Regarding your question - it is usually best to maintain the same verb tense within a sentence, but using variations of that verb tense is acceptable, i.e. using past and past perfect in the same sentence. However, this does depend on how these tenses are used together.
The one rule about the English language is that there are always exceptions. It is possible to have correct grammar and use two completely different tenses in the same sentence. It is very tricky, so I recommend not making a habit of it.
[This message has been edited by philocinemas (edited November 01, 2010).]
posted
"Had," as used in tchernabyelo's example, often signals to the reader that the author is moving into a memory (a few sentences) or into a flashback (entire scene).
If the story moves into a flashback, the scene usually needs to go to simple past fairly quickly--it's not a good idea to do the whole scene with "had" forms of the verb until the very end, when the author signals that the story is coming back to the story's "present."
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited November 01, 2010).]
posted
What Tchern said. (And Philo, American has combined plu into perfect, pity.) You use the tense based on what is needed. The past which is the present of the story is in simple, the past of the past is perfect. (I think that made sense.) It is perfectly acceptable to use both in a story because you have to talk about the farther past sometimes. Ex. "I ran in the park this morning and I noticed that someone else had run that same path with red paint on their boots, but then I realized that it was blood, someone had been bleeding on this path before I ran here this morning. I had to make a decision then and there, if I kept running I might have run into a murderer and I would have been killed myself, so that is why I am hiding under my bed right now, so I will live to see my next birthday."
I have a theory that people who say you have to stick with one tense throughout the whole piece or sentence must have had their brains twisted by a English teacher at some point in their lives. You make your tense choice based on where the event sits on a timeline, nothing else.
posted
Philo, many thanks for that. Here's what I was taught (many years ago in England):
Present - I walk Future - I will walk Past/Aorist - I walked Perfect - I have walked Pluperfect - I had walked Future Perfect - I will have walked
ANd the -ing forms of these are referred to as imperfect (I am walking, I was walking, I will be walking) and refer to ongoing actions.
English is a difficult language to describe tense in because of its almost complete use of the verb "to be" to indicate it; only the simple past/aorist involves no intrusion of that. In most other languages that I am familiar with, it's different word endings that denote tense and so it's often a lot clearer to a reader.
posted
I've tried to reduce the amount of "has / have / had" I have in my stories...I use the "find" feature of my word processor and then revise to eliminate...it's a try for a kind of immediacy in the writing...I'm not sure the results are that successful, so I'm thinking of cutting back on that (and other revisions of similar nature.)
(You'll notice I use those kind of verb tenses here...this is first draft stream-of-consciousness writing. I'll back up and rephrase, but not to excess.)
posted
FWIW, Martin, your English is excellent - a couple of typos / writing too quickly and missing a word (something we all do), but absolutely nothing to give away your non-native status.
You might also take a look at how some of your favorite English-language writers use the tenses in question, to see what response they evoke in you as a reader.
[This message has been edited by Grayson Morris (edited November 02, 2010).]
Yes, but that's conversional English. I don't really think about what tense should I use when I'm writing e-mail and such. Writing a story that I want to publish is another matter. I am a bit paranoid about what can be an excuse that an editor rejects a story. Bad grammar could easily be one.
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posted
I have studied two other languages, and I can assure you that most people who study other languages have a better understanding of verb tenses than many native speakers. I have not used either of the languages I studied, one of which is considered dead, in about 20 years, but I was well-versed in the use of their verb-tenses at that time. Often the greatest difficulty is using too formal writing or translating tenses to match the diction of another language and losing the colloquial use and meaning in the process.
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