A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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that is ongoing and may continue to the point of reference: They have been walking in the park all morning. Before we moved, we had been living in Arizona. By March, we will have been living in Arizona for two years.
1
sequence and consistency of verb tenses
It is important to keep verb tenses in the proper sequence so as not to disrupt the coherence of time in your writing. If the actions you are describing occur at the same time, keep the verbs in the same time:
Once Jane gets angry, it takes a long time for her to calm down.
When the timing belt broke, the engine stopped.
The news broke while she was sleeping.
2
If the actions you are describing occur at different times, use tenses that make logical sense:
We didn’t go to the museum on our last visit, but this time we will certainly go there.
After he had eaten the soup, everyone asked how it was.
Although they will soon be moving out, they have enjoyed living here.
3
The most common problems with tenses arise when you have to shift back and forth from the present to the past and when you are converting direct speech to indirect speech. Consider the following example:
I grew up in a neighborhood that surrounds a small park. We lived on a street that is lined with trees and has small, two-story houses. Many people park their cars on the street, but in the winter there’s so much snow that it’s difficult to find a space. My parents owned an old station wagon. Its heater had not worked for years.
4
In this narrative, the past events (growing up, owning a station wagon, and so on) are kept distinct from the conditions that continue into the present (the neighborhood surrounding the park, the street being lined with trees, and so on). While these conditions could have been described entirely in the past tense, the writer here wants to convey the sense of a continuing familiarity with the old neighborhood. There are, however, many conditions that continue into the present and must be conveyed by the present tense in almost any context: Galileo discovered that Jupiter has (not had) moons.The explorers camped on the Illinois River near where it joins (not joined) the Mississippi.
5
Sometimes writers shift from past to present tense when telling a story to add vividness to the events. This legitimate tense shift is a literary device called the historical present. It is familiar to readers of epic poetry, but people also use it when relating everyday anecdotes:
I was walking down Delancey Street the other day when a guy comes up to me and asks me for the time.
6
When writing about literature, it’s especially easy to mix up tenses. Suppose you are writing about Act V of a play in the present tense and refer back to something that happened in Act II using the past tense (after all, Act II is
