Present perfect: I have thanked my colleague for her help.įorming the past participle of English’s many irregular verbs may be harsh if you didn’t grow up with a curmudgeon at home or in English class.
Past: I thanked my colleague for her help. Note that the past participle of a regular verb looks just like the past tense of the verb, as in the next two examples. That’s easy enough.įorming the past participle of regular verbs is easy, too. The present tense form of “to have” includes “has” and “have,” as in she has and we have. The perfect verb has two parts: some form of the auxiliary verb “to have” and the past participle. (Don’t skip this section! I warned you that this verb stuff is hard!) Because of her continuing ability to write well, the judge trusts her to draft opinions.īefore considering the past and future perfect, let’s take a detour to examine what comprises the perfect tenses.
In the second sentence, Rebecca is still working for the judge. Rebecca has written excellent bench briefs for the past two years, so the judge now trusts her to draft his opinions.ĭid you catch the difference? In the first sentence, all of the action has been completed - the writing and the trusting - and Rebecca has moved on to a new job. Rebecca wrote excellent bench briefs, so the judge trusted her to draft his opinions. In one of the next two sentences, the impact of one verb from the past is still being felt in the part of the sentence happening currently. Let’s turn to the second use of the present perfect. In the second sentence, we assume that Rebecca is still clerking for the judge, perhaps because the judge hires only permanent clerks. In the first sentence, we assume that after the two-year clerkship, Rebecca found another job and the judge hired a new clerk. Rebecca has clerked for the judge for two years. Rebecca clerked for the judge for two years. Compare the meaning of these two sentences: Now comes the hard part: What if you want to show that action began in the past but is continuing? Or that its impact is still being felt now? To do that, you need a present perfect verb. To form the future, we typically just add will to the verb. Readers who struggle with past tense forms can find lists of irregular verbs online (and a dozen examples listed later in this article). Those of us who grew up speaking English are lucky that we don’t have to memorize these we know them automatically. There are a slew of irregular verbs: take-took, ride-rode, see-saw, just to name a few. If the verb already ends in –e, we just add a –d. The simple verb tenses show when the action took place: in the past, in the present or in the future.Īs shown in these examples, we typically form the past tense by adding –ed to words. While most of us are perfect in using the simplest verb tenses, we aren’t so unanimously fabulous with the perfect tenses. Verbs vary in tense to show us when the action took place. Verbs are the power brokers of sentences, conveying the action.
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