Let's talk about tenses
Don't worry, I hate them too.
English is a pain. It’s full of complicated rules that most of us barely understand because there are more exceptions to the rules than there are examples of the rules working.
A great example of this is the “i before e except after c” spelling rule that has around 5 times as many exceptions as examples that follow the rule.
But the place I see most writers trip up isn’t on the cieling (ceiling for us rule breakers) but on the use of tenses. Here I’ll go through the most common mistakes.
Count the mistakes in the following passage.
Becky walked down the road; her fingers trail along the chain-link fence. The last time she visited this place the fence had covered less of the road; now it covers the whole southern block.
How many did you find?
If you found three, you’re correct. I’ll put the same passage below with the problematic areas in bold.
Becky walked down the road; her fingers trail along the chain-link fence. The last time she visited this place the fence had covered less of the road; now it covers the whole southern block.
The difficulty with tenses is that there are not just three - past, present, and future - but twelve. Each of the three main tenses are broken into four more: simple, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous, giving us twelve total verb tenses.
Before you click away, don’t worry, I won’t be defining each tense with examples - that’s too much language even for me! Instead I’ll define only the ones used in our example.
In this example, we have two of the past tense forms: simple and perfect. Let’s define them quickly.
Simple Past describes events that have already happened and are finished. Most regular verbs simply take an -ed or -d ending to make simple past, though irregular verbs often form new words entirely (go - went; leave - left).
Past Perfect describes a more complex relationship between events in the past, typically combining had, had, or have with a past participle.
So, we can see in our example that the first sentence should be in simple past but the second half (her fingers trail along the chain-link fence) does not match this. Following the rule of simple past (adding an -ed or -ed to the verb), we can change this easily.
Becky walked down the road; her fingers trailed along the chain-link fence. The last time she visited this place the fence had covered less of the road; now it covers the whole southern block.
Great. Sentence one: fixed.
Now for our second sentence.
Let’s look at this one in two parts: The last time she visited this place the fence had covered less of the road and now it covers the whole southern block.
The first part we know, thanks to the context of the previous sentence, meant to be in a past tense. Because of the use of had, we know this is past perfect. So, our easy fix is to simply add had to our other verb (visited; to visit).
The last time she had visited this place the fence had covered less of the road
The second half of the sentence is a bit more fun because it uses now, a word which normally describes the present situation. However, this is a relative term, meaning now in this context refers to the now we are talking about - not the present tense now.
It’s a little confusing, granted, but the fix is just the same as above: find our tense and make the relevant changes to our verb (covers; to cover). Simple past will be out friend here.
… now it covered the whole southern block.
Putting all of these elements together, our passage now reads like this:
Becky walked down the road, her fingers trailed along the chain-link fence. The last time she had visited this place the fence had covered less of the road; now it covered the whole southern block.
Much better, no?
If you’re curious about the semi-colons, check out this post on the topic. (I’d not normally recommend using semi-colons in consecutive sentences but seeing as they’re not the focus of this post, I don’t mind.)
YES! It bothers me so much when, somehow, a book or short story slips into publication without these weird discrepancies being resolved. It's so jarring when you've been reading in the present tense and the author suddenly switches to past tense, or vice versa. (Flashbacks are one thing; switching in the middle of a scene...no.)
But this post has helped me realize that I have a lot of learning to do when it comes to understanding all 12 types. I don't remember learning about nearly that many in school, but because I enjoy writing in the present tense, I sometimes find myself stumbling over tenses when I want to briefly mention something that happened in the past. Maybe reading into this more would help.