Avoiding shifts that impede your readers

In four previous posts, we have discussed the common mistake of unnecessarily changing from one grammatical person to another. For example, an executive of a publishing house said:

“It was not a book where a whole house [third person] runs out and pushes like crazy, and you [second person] have to have success right away, because you [second person] spent all this money.” (See post.)

This unnecessary change, or shift, confuses and impedes the reader.

There are also other kinds of shifts. Towson University, as part of its Online Writing Support, includes a very helpful page on seven kinds of shifts: shifts in tense, voice, mood, person, number, discourse and sentence construction. The page includes illustrative examples of each.

Nice work, Towson.

The Takeaway: When you have a chance, read the whole page. From time to time, review it.

See disclaimer.

When combining Present Perfect tense and Future tense, don’t omit any verbs

When combining the Present Perfect tense and the Future tense in one sentence, don’t omit any verbs. That is to say, include all auxiliary verbs and all main verbs.

Omitting the first main verb is a common mistake. Here are two examples.

Example from Bleacher Report:

“Through significant pain, [Andrew] Bynum [pictured] gave everything he had and opted out of surgery, possibly putting his NBA career in jeopardy just to help his team win.... This won him major kudos with teammates, most notably Kobe Bryant, and head coach Phil Jackson. This has and will further contribute to the respect Bynum gets from his teammates and coaching staff alike.” (Boldface added.)

Correction:

has contributed and will further contribute

Example from The Market Ticker:

“We are not far away from a complete and total breakdown of lawful behavior among the population of this nation…. This has and will in the future occur because the government has refused to enforce long-standing laws…” (Boldface added.)

A literal correction would be:

has occurred and will in the future occur

A smoother correction would be:

has occurred and will continue to occur

The author did not notice that the meaning of this sentence is logically inconsistent with the phrase “total breakdown,” which occurs in an earlier sentence. For, when a total breakdown has occurred, nothing more can break down.

For additional information on the combining of tenses, see these two posts on the Sequence of Tenses: (1, 2).

The Takeaway: When combining the Present Perfect tense and the Future tense in one sentence, don’t omit any verbs. When you omit verbs, you run two risks: (1) that you will confuse some readers; (2) that you will appear to be careless.

See disclaimer.

The sequence of tenses (2)

If you want to achieve clear writing, you must be careful with the tenses of verbs. In particular, you must follow the Sequence of Tenses.* A wrong tense can change the meaning of a sentence and confuse your reader. There are two wrong tenses in this paragraph:

“I inspected the ruins of the [sic] New York’s Twin Towers, atop which I often dined, right after the attack. Downtown Manhattan was enveloped by a hideous, stinking miasma from the attack. I have never smelled anything so awful. It took me days to scrub the foul odor off my body. As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days earlier.”

Analysis

Fortunately for the reader, the two tense errors in the paragraph do not cause much confusion; the reader will probably guess the author’s meaning in each case.

In the first sentence, the verbs “inspected” and “dined” are both in the Simple Past tense; according to the Sequence of Tenses, these verbs imply that the author inspected the ruins of the Twin Towers in the same time period in which he often dined atop the Twin Towers.

But the reader sees that this is absurd, so he infers that “dined” should have been in the Past Perfect. The sentence should have read something like this:

Right after the attack, I inspected the ruins of New York’s Twin Towers, atop which I had often dined.

In the third sentence, “I have never smelled” is in the Present Perfect tense, which implies up to the time of writing the article. The reader quickly sees that the author probably means up to the time of inspecting the ruins, which calls for the Past Perfect:

I had never smelled anything so awful.

The Takeaway: When you are referring to events in the past or future, be careful to follow the Sequence of Tenses. Yes, your reader can often guess your meaning when you get a tense wrong. But don’t make him guess. Whenever you are in doubt as to the correct tense, consult a reference. I recommend this concise and handy summary of the Sequence of Tenses, on the web site of Purdue University.

See disclaimer.

*The Sequence of Tenses is the set of grammatical rules that describe how to use verb tenses to indicate the sequence in which events occurred or will occur.