When is past perfect optional

Children do not learn language from teachers, they learn first from their parents and then, quickly and irrevocably, from their peers. The main influence teachers have is to try to impose a bunch of shibboleths say it this way, not that way! It's a stupid cycle but it won't change any time soon, so kids have to learn the shibboleths, but they have nothing to do with the grammar of the English language. Otherwise you will wind up boring your friends and relations and writing " Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells " letters to the editor.

Is there such a thing as degradation of a language? I think it's properly called shift. This just seems like another way that UK and US English are moving apart in the same way the Romance languages did even if the common truism remarks they are getting more and more similar due to media. There is also the fact that mass marketed UK and US English in the form of novels or journalism tend to not be the way people actually speak, so how representative of either iteration of the language is suspect.

Best answer: Two data points. One: when I was a junior high school student taking German in the mids, I spent two years of class thinking that German had this bizarre "other" past tense because I did not understand that English also had two forms of the past tense. I used the past perfect tense occasionally when I spoke or wrote, of course, and I'd certainly read books that used it, but I had never encountered it in an academic setting, so I somehow never "noticed" it.

I was an A student in English at a fairly rigorous private high school. Two: Now that I am an adult, I understand the difference between the past perfect and the simple perfect. But I am writing a novel, and figuring out the tenses in some of the flashbacks has been a bitch.

I know the "rule" is to keep the tenses consistent, but more than one or two sentences in a row in the past perfect sets my intuitive alarm bells ringing I was really glad to read Jeanne's advice, because I'm pretty sure that is the rule that has arisen in terms of practical usage and it deviates from the rule found in the grammar books.

This is does not affect the example you gave, which does read as "wrong" to me. I think most editors would change that sentence and this mistake just slipped through.

I wonder if you've been noticing the first thing subconsciously, but then this more egregious error caught your eye. This suggests that the use of the past perfect tense is going the way of rule against ending sentences with prepositions: it's going to stick around for a while as a general 'best practice' for writing, but it will become less of a hard and fast rule.

There will also probably be situations where "good writing" calls for breaking the rule in the service of clarity or concision. Sorry if this lawless future is going to be stressful for you.

Response by poster: languagehat: I totally agree with you, and am seriously not the kind of person who believes in the degradation of the English language. The reasons why I asked this question were to find out if this is a real phenomenon or something I've been imagining, and to find out the driving forces behind it, so I can understand it better and not just react with, "Get thee behind me, Satan!

It breaks my reading flow and can reduce the amount of information the text transfers, or make understanding the text more difficult, as with the book I mentioned. There's enough redundancy in my example quote that this isn't an issue there, but to me it still feels awkward. Some people have said they don't share my feeling, and that's fine, of course. Best answer: As a writer and editor, I'm one of the big bad guys you can blame for this change. I can tell you exactly why the writer or copyeditor changed this.

These days, the push in style in written American English for newspapers and publications is to express things actively and concisely. Students are certainly taught this in high schools and universities these days, too. I think that's a good thing! It's four fewer characters, and two fewer syllables. Unless the specific meaning of something calls for the former and I don't think your example does, and I can't really think of any examples that would , I would always choose the latter.

In fact, I would go one step further than the editor for this piece. I'd change it to "emerged. Why use both of them? It's repetitive, like talking about "beginning to start" something. Just say "starting. Much better. That's even more concise and active, and it doesn't lose the root of what the author wants to express.

Now, if we could just get rid of that lousy parenthetical American English is particularly growing more concise over time, by the way In the States, speaking in a less concise way has always branded someone as professorial or lofty. In the day of Twitter and texting, this is even more true. Embrace the change! It's not stopping any time soon. Best answer: According to Theodore Bernstein's The Careful Writer , the past perfect is optional when you mention a specific point in time, e.

Also, past perfect starts to seem too stilted if you use it at every possible opportunity. I somehow feel the need to write this in more formal English than I normally do.

I consider myself a journeyman grammarian: I got decent grades in English and Grammar in school, and I think I know when to use a colon vs. Past perfect tense is important when comparing two events in the past, and trying to express their timing relative to each other. It's a very subtle difference, and one that really alters the sense in some cases and not in others.

Moreover, I think it's subjective as to whether it does. In the OP's example, I read it and couldn't see the problem at all, although I could see where others might. In my Kennedy example, it MAY be a little more obvious, but most people would probably understand what I meant in the first place.

I know they're trying to draw us into the story and create suspense where there is none because the events happened a long time ago and it's a done deal , but every time I read "Roosevelt has to unite several elements of his party Jeanne and Old Man McKay have the conflict in a nutshell. It has to be done carefully, though.

It's one of journalism's many shibboleths. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't, and I have to nudge a "had" back in there for meaning and clarity.

I'm curious whether this is easy to find outside of journalism settings. In the journalistic world, word count is king. We can also use the past perfect continuous here, so we most often use the past perfect simple with stative verbs. When he graduated, he had been in London for six years.

On the 20th of July, I'd worked here for three months. In the same way that we use the past simple to talk about unreal or imaginary things in the present, we use the past perfect one step back in time to talk about unreal things in the past.

This is common in the third conditional and after 'wish'. If I had known you were ill, I would have visited you. She would have passed the exam if she had studied harder. The past perfect tense is used to talk about actions that happened in the past before another action or a particular time. The action that refers to the first action uses the Past Perfect tense, and the second action is formed in the Simple Past tense. Note that the action that happened first is in the Past Perfect tense, and the second one is in the Simple Past tense.

We can place the second action dependent clause in the beginning of the sentence either. NOTE : sometimes, we use a past time marker, not an action, to refer to a time before which the action in the Past Perfect tense took place. NOTE : If the time or the action before which the action in the Past Perfect tense happened is not mentioned, understand that it is understood. We use JUST before the main verb in the Past Perfect tense to show that the time difference between the first action and the second time is quite less.

Here, we are using the past perfect tense to talk about the reason for a particular state of being in the past. NOTE: in spoken English, we generally contract the subject personal pronouns and the auxiliary verb had. Most people use the Simple Past tense and the Past Perfect tense interchangeably, not knowing they both have a different purpose to serve in the English language and should be accordingly.

The second one past perfect tense refers to an action that occurred in the past before a particular time; focus on the word BEFORE. It focuses on the fact that the action occurred in the past before a particular time. Click on the Past Perfect tense active and passive voice to learn how to change the active voice into the passive voice and when to write a sentence in the a passive voice. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

When to use the Past perfect tense? How to form sentences in the Past perfect tense? The teacher had ended the class before we took the notes.