Sorry to butt in like this. I'm sure Clive will give his expert advice but let me try to explain it the way I see it (from a non native speaker's point of view). Regarding the New York sentence, since both the living/working

I thought have was needed before spread to keep a single tense. That would be a good solution: They have appeared on message boards and in blogs and have spread by word of mouth. There are no dependent clauses here, by

Hi, Welcome to the Forum. Problem 1: img687.imageshack.us/img687/4138/testnx.jpg It's much easier for us to respond if you actually post the question here. Most of us don't want to go off and start searching other sites. It takes

Sorry to butt in like this. I'm sure Clive will give his expert advice but let me try to explain it the way I see it (from a non native speaker's point of view). Regarding the New York sentence, since both the living/working occur

Thank you Clive for the critique. For the New York sentence, is there anything wrong or misleading in the construction that needs to be reworded. After the rewording, the original past perfect context has been erased. Maybe I tried too hard to

Hi No, I'm afraid it's not correct. The problem is your use of the verb 'go'. You tried to use the negative form of the simple past tense and wrongly assumed it was 'did not went'. This is a tricky aspect of

Hi, No. There are two errors. 1. Say 'did not go', not 'did not went'. You need to review how to make simple past tense. 2. An English sentence must start with a capital letter. Clive

Hi, In both of your examples, I see no reason to use Past Perfect. I'd just use Simple Past. If you have typed them correctly, other parts of the wording suggest to me that these sentences were not written by native speakers.

I shouldn't have ate it. Or I shouldn't have eaten it. What's the difference? The second sentence is present perfect so is the first sentence simple past tense?

No. To build the simple past tense of a verb in a negative sentence, you use did + not + base form of the verb So, your sentence is correct this way: - I did not want him to come.