From the course: Writing with Flair: How to Become an Exceptional Writer

Mixed tenses

From the course: Writing with Flair: How to Become an Exceptional Writer

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Mixed tenses

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- Mixing up your tenses is one thing that contributes very much to unclear writing. Tenses are basically, you know, past, present, and future. Now, while talking, mixing up your tenses is forgivable. Right, it's sort of how we talk but as an elite writer, you need to be highly conscious of your tenses and make sure you keep them straight in your writing. Make sure that you're not switching between tenses in a haphazard or lazy way. Now, I've read great articles that take a reader back and forth between events in the past and currently, but that's done consciously and deliberately for style, not by accident or by default. Carelessness with tenses can negatively impact even a simple news article, take this one. Now, can you spot the dodgy tenses there? The word rescue at the start. The word says further down. Both of those are in present tense while everything else is written in the past tense. The piece is jarring to read as a result. You can't get full clarity on it. It creates a certain fuzziness in your writing that takes away from this thing, absolute clarity, which we're trying aspire to. I'm not gonna go into the grammatical aspects of this. I just want to encourage you to use some common sense. To notice when you're mixing tenses. Like here. Jake says he will not go to the party, even though he knew it will probably be the last chance he had to see Cathy before she is leaving for Paris. You can just feel that that's wrong, can't you? It doesn't create a clear picture for the reader because the tenses are sending you all over the place. Okay? They're sending your mind all over the place. Look at the mix up. Jake says, present, he will not, future, go to the party even though he knew, past, it will be, future, the last chance he had, past, to see Cathy before she is leaving for Paris. Try to clear that up so that it establishes clearly that Jake is talking in the past about the future. So, you start with Jake said and then continue from there. And remember that throughout that Jake is speaking in the past, he's talking about an anticipated future event, so you're looking for some balance between past and future, there. Okay, here's my tidier version. Now, see how much more easily comprehensible that is? None of that jumping around effect. Now, try the same thing by putting it all into Jake speaking in the present tense with Jake says. Jake says he won't go to the party, even though he knows it may be the last chance he gets to see Cathy before she leaves for Paris. Now, you can normally feel when it's off, so you can go a long way without knowing, even without knowing the particular grammatical rules around tenses. So, I want you to be very conscious of tenses in your writing and to make sure that they all line up really beautifully.

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