Tenses: Difference between revisions

Many languages, in order to distinguish between the past, present and future, have something called "tense". [[Self-Demonstrating Article|This trope happened when someone makes the ''other'' common mistake of amateur writing: unintentional tense shifts.]]

 

More often, the issue was that characters are speaking in the present tense while the story was being told in the past tense, and the writer has trouble switching from the immediacy of the dialog to the narration perspective, so you got things like this:

 

 

The correct tense usage would be:

 

or

 

People tended to relate experienced events in the past tense (as one would have expected) but relate events they are creating in the present tense (as they are creating them). This switch in tenses was used to judge the veracity of witness statements. It also explains why authors might drop into the present tense when they got to writing the bit of the story that they aren't planning out to begin with.

Confusion also arose with the perfect tense, technically called an ''aspect''. "He saw them in the kitchen" and "He has seen them in the kitchen" mean subtly different things. The past perfect served as a double past, but for constructions that ought logically to use a treble past, English grammar shrugged and breaks its own rules: 'She thinks he did it', and 'She thought he had done it' but 'She had thought he had done it'.

 

 

Related to this trope is [[Time Travel Tense Trouble]], where a conflict in the chronological order of history versus the order in which the character(s) or audience experienced it created confusion.

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[[Category:Tenses]]