The tenses in the English language unnerve many writers, especially the younger ones. They have the tendency to shift tenses for no obvious reasons. At times, the shift infects a particular sentence.

Writers, over the last decade, have been waxing lyrical about the rise of the present tense in English fiction. But this morning I read something entirely new – for me, at least. I read a manuscript ...

The word 'tense' comes from 'tempus', the Latin word for time. Some languages like Mandarin Chinese don’t have verb tenses but express time in different ways. When writing, it’s important to use the ...

Some writers like to use the present tense to tell a story in order to give the impression that it is happening right now. In fiction writing the present tense can create a dramatic effect and make ...