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

I would like someone to confirm my thoughts on the following sentence, to see if I am on the right track or am just in fantasy lala land, going off on a tangent: "Because Malcolm had never become a cutthroat CEO, he had few enemies." I

As soon as you see her, you say: Finally! I've been waiting so long! You use the present tense because there is no reason to use the past perfect unless there is a past reference point. The reference point is the moment she arrived, which can

Hello, you did a good job for the most part, except for one error and maybe two. She walks in, comes right up to me and says -past This isn't past tense. If it said walked in, came right up to me, and said, then it would be past

Hi Anon: If you look in any English language reference book under verb tenses, you will find the answer to your question. "be" is a helping verb (auxilliary) for the passive voice of verbs, and "have" is the helping verb for

Hi, In addition to the previous post, here is a reference that may help you. Whenever we use reference of time passed, like last week, and yesterday, a simple past tense will do just fine, and also, Words of past time is never to be used

what are the uses of the present form of verbs? Not sure what you mean. People have different names for the simplest form of the verb, as you find it in the dictionary. Sometimes it's called "the bare infinitive - without the

Depends on prior context. There may be a time reference in the simple past which limits or measures the factors on which the conclusion is based. For example, she may have died two years ago. On the face of it, either is correct.

can you explain to us your viwepoint? Probably not! All I can say is that the past perfect didn't bother me when I read what you wrote. (By the way, I think the simple past is just fine as well.) )) Yeah, that's what (and how) my intuition

can you explain to us your viwepoint? Probably not! All I can say is that the past perfect didn't bother me when I read what you wrote. (By the way, I think the simple past is just fine as well.) This would be my approach to explain further: