Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Herley
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Thanks for sharing that, Richard. I really enjoyed reading it.
One question: is it just me, or did she mess up the tenses of the verbs in a few phrases? You can't say everything in simple present and simple past, with occasional side-trips into the present continuous. There's a reason for other verbal tenses to exist, even though so-called "plain English" says we should use them as infrequently as possible.
An example: Lori said "I pretty much knew I wanted to go into journalism since I served as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do changed throughout the years." To me, that doesn't quite make sense -- you can't use a simple past tense to convey an ongoing state or action that has continued from a specific point in the past up until the present. If I'd been
Lori's copy-editor, I would have suggested "I
had pretty much
known I wanted to go into journalism since
serving as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do
had changed throughout the years" as a much clearer construction.
Does anyone else see what I'm saying?