Editing Practice "Warmup" Exercise No. 2

"Consistently writing in the past tense about completed events."

Present tense verbs, such as the verbs "is," "reports," "has," "allows," "causes," "thinks," and so forth, describe actions taking place now or in the present. If you are correctly describing events that took place in the past, however, you must use past tense verbs. Verbs like "was," reported," "had," "allowed," "caused," "thought," and so forth, accurately tell the reader when the actions took place. Anything you read in a published book or journal article will have taken place in the past. Even though you are reading the article now and the authors might have written about events in the present tense, at this point in time these events took place in the past. Accuracy and precision in your writing requires the use of past tense verbs to describe past events, especially if it was published several decades ago. It is considered an error in academic writing and violates an APA Publication Manual rule to use the wrong tense of a verb. Use past tense verbs to describe completed and published events.

Seeing an author use a present tense verb to describe an activity that occurred 30 years ago is jarring and irritating to readers because it is obviously inaccurate. This type of error could be especially embarrassing to a writer who was using the present tense to describe a researcher who, for example, retired or died ten years ago. Another reason to avoid this problem early is because it is work for an editor to correct a paper where the author has habitually written everything in the present tense. Practicing good writing habits saves editing work. Writing about past events in the present tense is something that novelists and journalists will occasionally do for stylistic reasons or for special emphasis. Creative writing encourages breaking the rules occasionally. It is considered incorrect, however, for formal academic writing which uses standard written English.

Instructions: Assume for purposes of this exercise that Dr. Jones' private jet crashed in the Amazon rain forest 5 years ago in a famous aviation accident, and that his patient John also died 2 years ago during an English Composition "all nighter" when his double espresso maker unexpectedly exploded in his dorm room. In your editing practice group, correct the following paragraph which describes events that were completed before 1990 (and that were published in an research journal in that year) so that it is consistently written in the past tense rather than the present tense.

"It is clear to Dr. Jones that John is not in good health. Dr. Jones reports that he frequently suffers from fatigue. John ingests No-Doz and drinks 6 to 10 cups of coffee per day which allows him to stay awake to study but causes him to hallucinate. His fatigued state causes his mind to occasionally perceive entoptic images in the periphery of his visual field. He thinks he sees images that remind him of molecules he studies in chemistry class."

How many changes were needed in the paragraph to correct the tense from the present tense to the past tense? If you made 13 changes in 5 sentences, consider how long would it take you to edit the first draft of a 10 page research paper written in the wrong tense?