Tense Check Online: Amazing Tips and Tricks on Editing Tenses in Your Paper
To ensure a well written paper you should definitely check the verb tense use in your text to make sure there are no mistakes. Proofreading verb tenses can be both confusing and time consuming and it may be better to do a tense check online rather than undertaking the task yourself. In many cases an online grammar check verb tense use will be more accurate as online tense checkers aren’t subject to human error. It will also be much faster as a tense detector tool will generally take a minute or less to identify problems with verb tense in your text.
How to Check a Paper for Correct Tense
There are many types of papers and texts that you may be required to perform verb tense editing on. The problem is different types of papers may require that different verb tenses be used. The following are some of the diverse types of papers for which identifying verb tenses may be necessary:
- Essays. There are several types of essays you may encounter in school including argumentative, expository, descriptive and narrative essays. Most essays will be written in present tense. Occasionally you may shift to past tense to refer to completed action/events. Narrative essays may use either present or past tense as the primary tense.
- Resumes. The use of tenses in resumes is pretty straight forward. Use past tense when describing positions you have previously held and present tense for a position you currently hold.
- News articles. Typically news articles are written in the past tense as they are relating events that have already taken place. However, news headlines often use present tense to make the stories appear “fresher” and more up-to-date.
- Progress reports. In the business world progress reports on different projects may often be required. Use simple past for reporting on tasks that have been completed and present continuous for projects/tasks that are currently ongoing. Present perfect can be used when reporting on recent developments.
- Academic papers. Academic papers have some of the strictest rules regarding verb tense use. However, there are really only 3 tenses that you need to concern yourself with.
- Present Simple tense. Used in the paper’s introduction and when discussing its purpose. This tense is also used for general statements, to refer to findings from previous studies, to refer to tables and figures and it may be used to describe the plots or events of a literary work.
- Past Simple tense. Use this tense to report the findings of previous studies, to describe the methods and data from a completed experiment and to report the results of your current study.
- Present Perfect tense. Present perfect tense is used to introduce new topics and to summarize previous studies. It can also be used to point out a gap in previous research and to describe previous findings without directly referring to the original paper.
The main things to be concerned with regarding tenses in papers is to ensure you are using the appropriate verb tense and that you avoid unnecessary verb tense shifts. You may have to do some paragraph editing with mixed tenses errors if your paper contains inconsistent verb tense shifts. An online tense corrector like ours can be very useful for identifying and fixing verb tense issues. The following are some examples of verb tense errors corrected using our tense corrector tool.
- Error example: “It can be difficult to hear the approaching of vehicles running on electric motors.” Corrected: “It can be difficult to hear the approach of vehicles running on electric motors.”
- Error example: “As soon as I booked my flight to Miami, I am finding that the prices for tickets were dropping.” Corrected: “As soon as I booked my flight to Miami, I found that the prices for tickets were dropping.”
Basic Guide for English Tenses Revision
To help you with correcting verb tenses we have put together a general guide for using tenses in your writing. There are three basic tenses that you can use. These are:
- Past tense. Past is used to describe actions and events that have already occurred.
- Present tense. Present tense is used when describing actions that are ongoing.
- Future tense. Future tense is used to describe things that haven’t happened yet but will in the future.
Past, present and future tense each have four subcategories:
- Simple tense. Simple tense is used to describe habitual or routine actions in the present tense, completed actions in the past tense and actions that will happen in the future tense.
- Continuous tense. Used when an action is incomplete or continuous.
- Perfect tense. Used when an action is complete/finished with respect to a certain point in time or after a particular event.
- Perfect Continuous tense. Used when an action is going on continuously over a long period of time and is not yet finished.
Having a guide to follow when using verb tenses is helpful but it can still be a bit confusing when trying to detect and correct verb tense problems. Do you find yourself asking can you help me change my verb tense to one more appropriate? If so we have a solution for you. The best way how to improve verb tense use in your writing is by using our tense shift checker to identify and correct tense related issues. Our writing tool can play a crucial role in verb tense error correction in any type of paper. Using our verb tense converter allows you to detect any tense related mistakes in your paper. After identifying errors our writing tool will suggest corrections to be made to fix these mistakes to ensure you submit a well-written paper free of any tense related issues.
For a complete and successful English tenses revision perform a tense check online using our verb tense fixer.
