Verb Tense and Consistency
Yet another reason our English is
a difficult language to learn.
Consistent verb tense
• One BIG problem
that many writers
have is confusing
verb tense for no
reason.
 Marty McFly went
back to the future
and will get the girl
in the end.
Verb tense tells your reader the time you are
writing about.
 Past: You are covering an event for a
newspaper, or writing a reflective personal
narrative.
 Present: Your story is taking place as we
speak.
 Future: You are writing an essay about a plan
to accept corporate sponsors at your school.
You are writing in future tense because the
actions have not happened yet.
Irregular verbs
• Irregular verbs play a huge role in messing
up the English language!
• Irregular verbs “morph” in strange ways.
• Here’s how they work:
• First, you have to understand a regular verb…
 A regular verb forms its past tense by adding ed or d
to the present form.
• EX: work = worked
• EX: breathe = breathed
• Irregular Verbs form their past tense in other
ways, including:




vowel changes (begin, began)
consonant changes (make, made)
vowel and consonant changes (see, saw)
no changes (burst, burst).
The inconvenient truth:
• The best way to improve your understanding of
verb tense is to READ!
 If you get used to seeing verbs used correctly, you’re
more likely to use them correctly yourself.
Subject/Verb agreement
Read this sentence to yourself. Which verb
works with the subject?
“Each of the woman’s 99 cats, from Jerry
and Kramer down to the kittens, Bart and
Lisa, (was-or were?) named after a
character in a television show.”
Subject/Verb agreement
Read this sentence to yourself. Which verb
works with the subject?
“Each of the woman’s 99 cats, from Jerry
and Kramer down to the kittens, Bart and
Lisa, was named after a character in a
television show.”
• Did you guess right? If not, here’s why…
Continuing on…
• A singular subject needs a singular verb; a
plural subject needs a plural verb.
 Since “Each” is singular, then the verb “was”
must also be singular
• Its really easy if you can first ID the simple
subject (a noun that needs to agree with
the verb).
• Write down the simple subject from the
following sentence:
 A bag of blue-corn tortilla chips usually costs
about two dollars.
• An easy way to find the simple subject is
to split the complete subject into parts.
 A bag usually costs about two dollars.
 Of blue-corn tortilla chips usually costs about
two dollars.
If you understand this:
Verb Tense Pt. II
Perfect Tense and Irregular Verbs
Present Perfect Tense Verbs
• Express action that began in the past, but
continues in the present (or is completed in
the present).
• EX: Our boat has weathered worse storms than this one.
• EX: We did our bell work
at the beginning of class,
and now we are taking
notes.
Past Perfect Tense Verbs
• Express an action in the past that occurred
before another past action.
• EX: They reported, wrongly, that the hurricane had
•
missed the island.
EX: I had never seen a storm as vicious as that one.
Future Perfect Tense Verbs
• Express action that
will begin in the
future and be
completed by a
specific time in the
future.
• EX: By this time tomorrow, the
hurricane will have smashed
into the coast.