![]() ![]() ![]() (Ah, much better.)Įditors are turned off by the excessive use of the passive voice, and passive writing is often wordy writing-this can quickly brand you as an amateur. Melissa drove the car quickly down the street. The car was driven quickly down the street. Both of the following sentences are technically correct, but sentence #2 uses an active voice to drive the action… Pick one tense and stick to it.Ī second problem involves using the passive voice. Obviously, there are two tenses (past and present) where there should be one, and this is jarring to the reader. I wanted to find an open drugstore, and I walk into the first one I see. Is this happening now? Is this a flashback? Editors do not care what tenses are used as long as they are used correctly.įor instance, a big, red amateur flag pops up if verb tense is flat-out wrong. ![]() Verb tense puts the reader in the proper time frame, and messing around with it can be incredibly distracting, especially if you’re inconsistent. There are various shades of difference between, say, the future and the future perfect, and authors must determine what accurately describes the sequence of events they are trying to convey. “Is there a preferred tense choice for fiction writers, or does one’s choice of verb tense brand one as a hack or an amateur?”Įven though tenses fit neatly into a table, making the proper choices isn’t so cut-and-dried. We’ll give a quick overview of the proper usage of all the verb tenses, but first, here’s a question from one reader: A letter to the editor will most likely be written in the present tense, and a nostalgic essay about your childhood will be primarily written in the past tense. Nearly every piece of fiction will require a variety of verb tenses to show the reader the sequence of events throughout the story. But how do you know which is the best (or correct) verb tense to choose? What’s the difference between past, present, future, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect? And how do the simple and progressive verb forms play into it? Here’s a chart that breaks down the differences between verb forms into a simple and easy-to-read format. The English language has a nice, neat system of verb tenses to choose from. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |