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Activity: Verb Tenses

Site: Saylor Academy
Course: ENGL000: Pre-College English
Book: Activity: Verb Tenses
Printed by: Guest user
Date: Friday, September 20, 2024, 9:16 PM

Description

Another consistency issue is regarding tense consistency. Read the following section and get some practice by doing the activity. When you are done, compare your responses to the answer key.

Table of contents

Verb Tense Consistency

In addition to parallelism, we need to also be consistent with verb tense. 

Tense refers to when a verb is taking place and in order for our readers to follow what we are saying, consistency is important. 

For example, read the following two sentences (I have placed the verbs in italics):

The shoplifter walked quickly toward the front of the store.  When a clerk shouts at him, he started to run.

It is very confusing that the shoplifter walked in the past, is shouted at in the present, and started to run in the past…. The author of these sentences is asking readers to do a time warp!

"The Time Warp" is a great song from a fantastic musical, but not such a cool thing to do to our readers…                        

To have tense consistency, the verbs need to match.

The shoplifter walked quickly toward the front of the store.  When a clerk shouted at him, he started to run.

Source: Erin Severs
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License.

Correcting for Verb Tense Consistency Activity

Read the following groups of sentences to find the verb/s that are not consistent with the tense of the action taking place. After you find the verb/s, rewrite the sentence correcting the inconsistency.

  1. The overturned truck, smashed cars, and emergency vehicles stopped traffic on one side of the interstate.  On the other side, drivers slow down to look at what had happened.
  2. In the movie, the rock monsters fought one another smashing everything in sight. When the hero tries to stop them, they tossed him aside like a rag doll.    
  3.  When Martin was filing his taxes, he stumbled on a rebate program he had missed in prior years.  He fills out the application for it, and then sent it.
  4. The bobolink, a type of grassland songbird, travels over five thousand miles to migrate to South America every year. Sometimes it took breaks in its trip, but it completes this journey in under two months.
  5. Barack Obama was a community activist and then an Illinois senator. He becomes the 44th president in 2009 and served two terms.

Answer Key

  1. The overturned truck, smashed cars, and emergency vehicles stopped traffic on one side of the interstate.  On the other side, drivers slowed down to look at what had happened.
  2.  In the movie, the rock monsters fought one another smashing everything in sight.  When the hero tried to stop them, they tossed him aside like a rag doll.    
  3.  When Martin was filing his taxes, he stumbled on a rebate program he had missed in prior years.  He filled out the application for it, and then sent it.
  4.  The bobolink, a type of grassland songbird, travels over five thousand miles to migrate to South America every year.  Sometimes it takes breaks in its trip, but it completes this journey in under two months.
  5. Barack Obama was a community activist and then an Illinois senator.  He became the 44th president in 2009 and served two terms.