When writing your paper or any other type of writing, it is important that you use the same tense consistently in your work. Your tense depicts when the action was done. Therefore, if your readers do not know when the action was done, they are likely to lose the flow of the work and get lost in the confusion. Eventually, lack of consistency leads to poorly written content that is hard to understand, jumbled, and choppy. Readers get a hard time following scenes and connecting one activity to another.
Why Do Writers Need Help with Verb Tense Consistency?
The main reasons for lack of tense consistency include the following:
- Adding multiple activities in one paragraph. You may want to take readers to sometime in the past or the future. However, if you mix several activities in different timelines, there is a chance that you might mix up your tenses and lead to confusion.
- Poor understanding of the “perfect” form of verbs. The ‘perfect form of verbs connect actions from different timelines such that readers find a logical flow of actions. However, if you do not understand the perfect form, you will likely misuse tenses and lead to confusion. Here is an example, “He had established his business before the fire accident.” The reader knows what activity came before the other.
- Poor proofreading of the work. If you do not take your time to go through your work, the chances are that you are likely to miss a few tense errors and be inconsistent. By reading through the work, you can tell where there issues with the flow of events and tenses. Besides, our verb tense consistency checker may help find and fix issues with inconsistent verb tenses.
How to Keep Your Verb Tenses Consistent: the Best Practices
Here are a few tips to help with verb tense consistency. They will help prevent some obvious mistakes with tenses:
- Always determine when your story occurs. You could be writing in the present, past, or event in present continuous. Determining when the story runs helps you keep all the verb tenses throughout your manuscript. Here is an example, “The high winds damage buildings when there is bad weather.” (Happens in the present) or “The high winds damaged the building when there was bad weather.” (Happens in the past)
- Whenever writing a reality, outgoing truth, or an aspect of theory, use the present tense. For example, “The moon rotates around the earth in 24 hours.”
- If something happened at a specific time in the past, use the past tense. For example, “He came home late.”
- If an action happened before another event, use past perfect. For example, “He had reached home before it rained.”
- Whenever possible, avoid clamming activities happening in different timelines on the same paragraph. Describe an event and then take your readers to the next period over several sentences. This creates a smooth flow of events in your work.
- Always proofread your work after completing it. Give yourself enough time to read through and find tense errors. Our tense agreement checker can come in handy to help find and fix inconsistent verb tenses.
Use Verb Tense Agreement Correction Online
Our tool can help with verb tense consistency and other errors in your writing. It has several features and capabilities, as discussed below.
Sentence tense checker
Our tool comes with a guideline on how to check verb tense agreement. It finds errors in your tenses and suggests solutions to fixing the problem. The tense help works with all the tenses. Its algorithm checks the noun and verbs with other parts of your sentence to establish if there is some agreement and makes a suggestion.
Verb consistency checker
The tool enlightens you on how to spot verb tense consistency. It brings to your attention any tenses that are different from your main verb forms and suggests a solution. It also helps you integrate paragraphs where you discuss events that take place in the past.
Our tense check online is accurate and easy to use. You can depend on it to determine whether your work has verb tense issues with a few clicks. Just open the site and paste your work on the editor and it will find errors automatically.
Other Features and Capabilities of Tense Helper
Our tense helper is a versatile tool that helps fix various issues with your writing. The how to check if my tenses agree app has other features that include the following.
Grammar checker
In addition to checking the verb tenses, the tool also checks grammar and spelling issues in your work. It checks and fixes punctuation, wrong word choice, misuse of caps, poor spacing, and filler words. This helps you to present concise papers.
Tense shift checker
The verb tense finder online can also detect any verb tenses that have shifted in the course of your writing. This helps you determine whether the changes in tenses should remain or change accordingly. Should you decide to change them, the essay tense checker provides you with suggestions so that you do not make more mistakes when making changes.
Use our verb consistency checker to proofread any content!
