[stylist] Past Simple and Perfect Usage

[Neil Butters]

Hi Angela and Everybody,

>From a grammar book I use:

Past tense: I ate pizza last night.
Past perfect tense: I had eaten pizza just before you arrived.

And it continued rather unhelpfully:

If you think clearly about what you're trying to say, usually the choice of 
verb tenses will be obvious.

But as I said in my question, I've seen flashback paragraphs in which both 
the past simple and perfect seem to have been used interchangeably.

Neil


--------------------------------------------------
From: "Angela Fowler" <fowlers at syix.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 1:50 PM
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Past Simple and Perfect Usage

> Whoa, this one's over my head. Obviously the past simple and past perfect
> are forms of the past tense, but what is the difference between the two?
> Angela
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Neil Butters
> Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 10:06 AM
> To: stylist at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [stylist] Past Simple and Perfect Usage
>
> Hello All,
>
> I have  a question about using the past simple and past perfect. I know 
> that
> when a story is told in the past simple, flashbacks or anything else that
> took place previously use the past perfect. But I have read many stories
> told in the past simple that abandon that rule in flashback paragraphs.
> Typically, the author switches from the perfect to simple in the same
> paragraph even though the whole thing describes a past event. Here is an
> example from The Last Great Clown Hunt, a story told in the past simple:
>
> I had glimpsed the stilt dancers only once. Billy Boy and I were watching
> them through a gap in the big top when the shaman caught us. He ran me 
> off;
> he allowed Billy Boy to stay. I still had a hard time picturing Billy Boy 
> as
> one of them. To me he'd always seemed like a clown wannabe.
>
> So why is the past perfect used in the first sentence, "I had glimpsed," 
> but
> not in subsequenbt sentences? Why not "Billy Boy and I had watched...?" Or
> "he had allowed...?"
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> Neil
>
>
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