These sentences are taken from COCA: When I was young I had wandered through Dale Creek on summer days. They'd laughed at my name when I was young , and I had n't liked it much. He had evidenced traces of it when he was

The tense is a tool. You choose the option when you wish to clarify the time relationship between two (or more) actions or events. We'd really need to see more to judge fairly if the past perfect is useful in this particular case.

You make me laugh. (In a good way.) With out seeing the rest of the writing I have a hard time to be sure, but that sentence as written reads really weird. Past tense would shurely be enough here.

I'm writing a college essay in which the sentence "After graduating from (college), he had taken the business world by storm." The context it is used in is within a eulogy. My question is whether the past perfect tense can be used

Here's how it should be: Jackson would have celebrated his fiftieth birthday this August if he were alive . Jackson would have celebrated his fiftieth birthday this August if he had not died earlier this year . There are a

It can be put in present perfect and past perfect using "if" like this: If the train have already left , we shall/will take the next train. (formal present perfect subjunctive) If the train had already left , we should/would

Now if I look up "are," the dictionary tells me that it is the present plural of "be." But what I would expect is that it would tell me that it is the present plural of "am" or "is" because those are the

Something I want to know, is way they use "to be" as the lexeme when the first persion singular "is" seems more obvious, at least to me. The tenses I was obliged to learn in school were future perfect, future, present, past

The problem you are having is that the felt goes with she and the convicted goes with her son , and so you can not say She felt convicted by the media... As a result you have to put her son into a subordinate something (clause, whatever) to keep

I think the reason why they were complaining was because most of the people had/have paid to hear the actors sing and not you. I think both past perfect and present perfect could work in this situation?