My Confusion
OK I have to admit my teacher helped me fix the mistakes in this stuff, so I didn't give you a bad example. But I really want to share this with you, because it helped me a lot. (I wrote "wanna" and "cos" first but it's silly because I'd be mad if I forgot and wrote them in O-level. Must practise the good stuff all the time.)
But back to my problem. Like you I have done years of English study but my verbs were always wrong. You see when I wanted to write about an action I knew which word to use but how to put it? English verbs have so many endings!! I had a chat with my teacher and she told me that most mistakes she sees are in verbs, and for lots of students, 90% of the red marks on their compositions are because of verbs!
She told me she wanted me to try an experiment to see if I could find a way of getting more correct and being more confident. (You see, I was beginning just to guess whenever I had to write a verb - I never really knew what was right!)
OK. She said I was to get a story book and open it to a middle page, then find a long paragraph with no speech in it. I was to find the verbs and then report back.
What I found in the book
I think you should find the verbs yourself before having a look at what I found. Ask yourself what tense the verbs are too. It will help!! This is the paragraph from Harry Potter.
Life at the Burrow was as different as possible from life in Privet Drive. The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasley's home burst with the strange and unexpected. Harry got a shock the first time he looked in the mirror over the kitchen mantlepiece and it shouted, "Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!". The ghoul in the attic howled and dropped pipes whenever he felt things were getting too quiet and small explosions from Fred and George's bedroom were considered perfectly normal. What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron's, however, wasn't the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul; it was the fact that everybody there seemed to like him. Mrs Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and liked to force him to eat fourth helpings at every meal. Mr Weasley liked Harry to sit next to him at the dinner table.
OK Maybe some of the words are hard, but I still read it because it's so much fun and exciting too. But look hard for the actions. Oh, and we are not worried about words inside speechmarks - those are most present tense.
Here are the verbs
Did you find them all? I now know I must look for actions, or maybe the verbs "be" or "have". And I know I must be careful about "-ing" words as sometimes they are not telling me the main actions in the sentence. Anyway, we are looking for tenses, and -ing words don't show tense!! (That was another lesson!!)
Life at the Burrow was as different as possible from life in Privet Drive. The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasley's home burstwith the strange and unexpected. Harry got a shock the first time he looked in the mirror over the kitchen mantlepiece and it shouted, "Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!". The ghoul in the attic howled and dropped pipes whenever he felt things were getting too quiet and small explosions from Fred and George's bedroom were considered perfectly normal. What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron's, however, wasn't the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul; it was the fact that everybody there seemed to like him. Mrs Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and liked to force him to eat fourth helpings at every meal. Mr Weasley liked Harry to sit next to him at the dinner table.
So what did the teacher know I would discover? Eighteen verbs out of twenty two were in the past simple tense!! Three of the other four were verbs following "to" which mostly means they will be the ordinary word with no endings. Only one was a different past tense - "were getting" - past continuous.
My teacher's advice
She said I was making my stories too difficult and making mistakes because I never knew which verb form to use. So she said, "Keep it SIMPLE." She smiled, and it took me a long time to understand. If the best story writers use past simple most of the time, then I should too, when I was writing stories. Teacher said that some other tenses helped make a story better, but that I was making so many mistakes, it would be better to use past simple all the time.
Now this is the really magic thing she said - that past continuous "were getting" could have been written "got" and it would not be wrong!! So I will worry about using past continuous and past perfect and all that stuff when I start getting 90% of my verbs right. For now, I am going to keep it simple - past simple!!
Just one final note. Did you know the past simple is the EASIEST tense in English? No worries about adding "s" or not - only one form for all verbs except "be" (which has "was" and "were") - BUT you do have to learn your irregular verbs. I find learning them easier than deciding about tenses!!
Hope this helps ..... Rashidah
Your turn to try, and maybe to help.
I hope that is helpful and interesting. Believe me, my compositions were covered in red ink before, but now my work really is 90% correct. Do try this if you have trouble getting verbs right - if you are writing stories that is. And try the experiment with a storybook. It's amazing that I spent so many years not understanding tenses, and now I find the good writers do not use so many anyway!
Finally I hope you will email some hints in, and share what you find helpful with us other students. Lucky I know how to type, eh? So many words!
