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You must use Consistent Verb Tenses in paragraphs and when speaking

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writingHi everyone!


Today we’re talking about how to correctly use verb tenses in paragraphs, when we are writing.


One important idea is that we choose what the time/tense of our story/paragraph is from our Topic Sentence. Then ALL of the sentences must match that time/tense, unless there is a clear reason why we need to change the tense. For example, if I said, “Today I am Zooming with my ESLclass, but yesterday I Zoomed with my Speech class.” That sentence talks about 2 different days/times, and so my verbs must reflect/match that.


The Simple Present = fact or habit


The Simple Past = an action that happened at a SPECIFIC time in the past and stopped.


The Present Perfect = an action that happened in the past, but when it happened is not important,
for 3 possible reasons: 

  1. maybe I don’t remember when it happened;
  2. maybe it repeated in the past;
  3. maybe it didn’t stop, so it started in the past but MAYBE continues in the present.