Writing Tips - Grammar, pt 2

Part two: Tense of the Narrative, and Plural and Singular Nouns

Tenses: No, we’re not talking about a hard day at work, but rather verb tenses. What, basically, is the time-direction of your narrative? Is the chronicler telling about something that has already happening, is happening, or will eventually happen?

In most works of fiction, the narrative is in “past tense.” It’s already happened. Occasionally, you’ll find a book in “present tense” – it’s happening now, as you’re reading it – and these are usually of the “pick your own adventure” sort. The ones where you don’t read about the knight in shining armour, but rather, you are the knight in shining armour and the choices you make determine whether you rescue the princess or if the evil wizard turns you into a newt. I’ve never seen a book written in “future tense” – it will happen, but it just hasn’t happened yet – but if you know of one, let me know.

As a general rule, once you pick a tense, you stick with it. One of the most common phenomena I see in young and new writers is a bizarre switching back and forth between past and present tenses. Like pronouns, there’s far more to the subject than I’m covering in these lessons. If you want to learn all of the sub-tenses, again Wikipedia has a lot to say on the matter. I’d like to not be writing grammar lessons all year, so we’ll just be learning some basics.

Past Tense: The narrative is recounting events which have already happened. The events recounted are no longer happening, and it is not a continuous occurrence. This is like your LiveJournal; you write about your day when you get home in the evening.
° Shaun and Ed walked to the pub.
° David was eaten by zombies.
° Liz broke up with Shaun.
° There were hundreds of zombies.

There is also past perfect. Past perfect is very similar, but it implies that the events it’s describing happened before some other event that already took place.
° Shaun and Ed had walked to the pub.
° David had been eaten by zombies.
° Liz had broken up with Shaun.
° There had been hundreds of zombie outbreaks.

Present Tense: These events are happening as the narrative recounts them. This is like Twitter; you write about the events as they’re happening.

° Shaun and Ed are walking to the pub.
° David is being eaten by zombies.
° Liz is breaking up with Shaun.
° There are hundreds of zombies outside.

Present Simple doesn’t really describe any sort of definite timeline, but just that what’s being described happens on a continuous or frequent basis.
° Shaun and Ed go to the pub.
° David is eaten by zombies.
° Liz breaks up with Shaun.
° There are hundreds of zombies.
Okay, admittedly, the David example is a bit weird. Traditionally, one can only be eaten by zombies once. But you get the point.

Future Tense: These events have not yet happened, but the narrative says that they will. This is like your day planner; you write down what you’re going to do before you do it.

° Shaun and Ed will go to the pub.
° David will be eaten by zombies.
° Liz will break up with Shaun.
° There will be hundreds of zombies.

You should avoid using the word “get” as much as possible. It’s one of those empty filler words that doesn’t have any attached imagery or meaning.

Conditional: Exactly what it sounds like. There is a condition that must be met before the action takes place.
° Shaun and Ed would have gone to the pub.
° David would have been eaten by zombies.
° Liz would have broken up with Shaun.
° There would have been hundreds of zombies.

You can also use a conditional future tense as well. It’s muddy and confusing, though.
° Shaun and Ed will have gone to the pub.
° David will have been eaten by zombies.
° Liz will have broken up with Shaun.
° There will have been hundreds of zombies.

Parts of the Word: There are three main parts of a word: the prefix, the root, and the suffix. The root is the main part of the word. It’s the bit that if you cut off the beginning or the end (or sometimes both), will be the bit that tells you what it means.

Preordained

The prefix and the suffix can be changed about to place the tense, ownership, or amount. They do other things as well, but we won’t get too indepth.

Plurals and Singulars No, not the mobile phone company. When a noun is singular, there is only one of it. When it’s plural, there are two or more, whether a finite or infinite number.

Singular nouns are the easiest.
° There’s a girl in the garden.

Plural nouns can be kind of funny. In most cases, you need only add an “S” to the end.
° There were hundreds of zombies outside.

Sometimes, your noun will already end in S, though. In most cases, you would add “es” to the end.
° David and Dianne taught classes together.

Sometimes, you will add the suffix to “ies”.
° Shaun doesn’t have many hobbies.

Other times, the word changes completely.
° Daisy is afraid of mice and spiders.

And other times still, the word doesn’t change at all.
° There are plenty more fish in the sea.

For the most part, words do a good job at following rules about when they should change. Most of it just comes down to memorisation, though.

Plural and Singular Nouns within a Single Sentence:</B> And this is why we did sentence diagramming. When you have a singular noun and a plural noun, you have to know which noun is the subject of the sentence before you conjugate your verb (which tense you use, so to speak).
° There are hundreds of zombies outside the pub.
You would not (normally) say “zombies is”; you would say “zombies are”. Since “zombies” is the subject of the sentence, and “pub” is a noun that denotes location, the verb is conjugated around “zombies”.
° Shaun is running from the zombies.
Shaun is the subject of this sentence, and the zombies are what he is running from.

Plural Units as a Singular: I said we were going to get our hands dirty, didn’t I? In previous lessons, I mentioned that rules change not only from language to language, but between dialects of the same language. The place this phenomenon most appears is with plurals, and between the American and British dialects (Australian and Canadian English seem to still do their own things, but I only really know one Canadian and one Australian, so my knowledge and exposure to those dialects is highly limited).

In some cases, you will have a plural noun that is no longer a set of separate bodies, but one collective.
° The only thing the zombies cared about was eating the tasty humans.
° The only thing the zombies care about is eating the tasty humans.

Now, here is where it can get tricky. Some nouns which the American dialect treats as a singular, the British dialect will often treat as a plural.

American English would say:
° The group runs away from the zombies.

British English would say:
° The group run away from the zombies.

Why the difference? I honestly do not know. But there it is.

None: None causes a lot of problems as well. Is it singular? Is it plural? Well, technically, since it’s implies zero, it’s neither. Strictly speaking, “none” is a contraction of “not one”, so you should conjugate around that.
° None of the beer in the pub was cold.
° None of the zombies were looking at them.