Verb Tense Consistency

Verb Tense Consistency

Verb tense consistency is a concept that I learnt during this course. I was aware of this concept intuitively, but did not know the term and the objective definition of it. In this post, I will give a simple overview of verb tense consistency concept, understanding of which will help us write coherent prose and choose of correct verbs in sentences.

Writing is a form of storytelling. The stories we tell have a time frame associated with it. They have either occurred in the past, might be currently occurring or likely to occur in the future. We use simple tenses, like past, present and future to denote the time frame of the event.

Verb tense consistency strives to demonstrate a coherent picture of the action happening to the reader of the sentence. The emphasis is on using correct verbs to maintain consistency within the time frame of the narration.

To illustrate the point, let us take an example of a wrong sentence.

The comedian continues to share more jokes as the audience applauded and asked for more.

Here “continues to share” is in present tense, but “applauded and asked” is in past tense. It means that audience had already applauded and asked for more. This does not capture the state accurately because, audience are continuing to ask for more jokes and it should be in present tense.

The correct way to write this sentence is,

The comedian continues to share more jokes as the audience applaud and ask for more.

The corrected sentence gives an example of maintaining a single tense for the main discourse and conveys the picture accurately.

Let us take a contrary example where the shift in tense is necessary. We shift tense to indicate a change in time frame from one action or state to another. It applies to sentences which denote action already happened in the past.

An example sentence is,

The children love to eat their cake, which they prepared themselves.

It clearly is not the situation of children preparing the cake and eating it simultaneously. They had baked it beforehand and they are continuing to eat it now.

Both the examples illustrate the use of verb tenses to accurately convey the picture to the reader.

In particular, we rely on past tenses to narrate historical events, present tenses to state facts, refer to actions and discuss our ideas and future tense for events yet to happen.

To maintain verb tense consistency, we establish a primary tense for main discourse, and use the primary tense to denote all the actions happening in the time frame. We occasionally shift to other tenses to indicate change in time frame.

I have presented only two simple cases in this post, but I hope the reader is sufficiently intrigued to actively look for more examples with complex sentences, which deal various forms of perfect and progressive tenses.