Sunday 8 June 2014

Tense


I was never taught the rules of grammar at school. I have no idea what any of the tenses are called. I just write by instinct.

I seem to have got away with it so far, but there's always this sense of anxiety. Particularly as I do write a lot of stories with complex nested flashbacks...


4 comments:

Jo said...

The lure of the past perfect... when is it too much? Especially for writing for US audiences and they don't know what it is.

I didn't learn what a perfect tense was til I did my TEFL course, post degree. I resent it a lot that some govt official decided for me that I didn't need to learn grammar. I think it's one reason why the Irish are such bad language learners. We don't really get how they work. We learn grammar inately, they say. Well, I'm lucky, in that I had parents who were able to use it well, but my inlaws say 'I seen it' and 'I don't it' because that's what they learned inately. Such a stupid theory! Bring back Latin, I say :)

We'll have a tense overview the next time we meet, it'll be fun :)

Chris said...

I'm absolutely certain that the reason I ended up completely failing to learn German was that they never bothered to teach us English grammar.

Janine Ashbless said...

I agree - I so wish we'd been taught proper grammar.
I got away with it, mostly, but shit - the laissez-faire attitude *particularly* disadvantages children from poorer and less-educated family backgrounds. If you only learn language "innately" then you learn it from your family.

Jo said...

*oops*, that should have been 'I seen it and I done it' in my post above. Not sure why my fingers do this to me. Perhaps because I learned typing innately!