4/2/2023 0 Comments If i remember correctly![]() ![]() ![]() Probably the number one sin I see people committing when answering questions is giving an attitude to the original poster (who I’ll call the OP from now on) that they’re stupid/lacking/deficient/lazy in some way for not knowing the answer themselves. We’ll agree to disagree :-) Ignorance is Not Stupidity That’s cool, this is just my opinion – vive la différence, and all that – but don’t expect to convince me to change my views. I’ll start out by saying that some of you will disagree with elements of what I state below. I’ve woven in some of the replies and private distribution list discussions I’ve had over the last two months as well – thanks to those involved – you know who you are. This is the necessary corollary to that post – how to answer questions politely and correctly, in my opinion – because I see people being discourteous and sometimes unprofessional in their replies. Based on the responses, and private discussions, many of you out there see the same trend and are dismayed by it. In reality, the author of the summary has read the book in the past, and is describing something from his or her own past (memory of the book's plot), and the natural tendency would be to use the past tense.Back in August I wrote a long post about how to ask questions politely and correctly to address what I see as a growing volume of poorly asked questions by people who often don’t have the common courtesy to be polite and also often come across as feeling entitled to an answer. Another possibility is that the present tense is merely a formal convention for such summaries. Or it could be that the author of the summary is referring to Holly's seeing this man at the bar on a number of occasions in the past, and the "pastness" of those sightings caused the speaker to choose "remembered" instead of "remembers". When they are narrating a series of events, their grammatical choices often reflect an unspoken thought. A practiced author would be very aware of tense, but this sort of shift is not uncommon among ordinary speakers. In the passage quoted, the author shifts into the past tense for reasons unexplained. Robbery the day before, I remembered the robber's blue tie. When the police detective was questioning me yesterday about the bank ![]() I remembered (at some point in the past) his blue tie. Past tense indicates that the action occurs in the past. Present tense indicates that the action occurs in the present. And when past tense is used, it is to emphasize the fact that I have remembered something. When present tense is used, it is to emphasize the action of the verb which happens now. When I'm having a conversation with someone, which one of the two sentences is more proper?Īccording to my own understanding about the word 'remember'. My question is that can I apply present tense to this sentence in this paragraph? In general, the tense used in the above context is present tense except the sentence in bold, which is past tense. ![]() Speaking in her sleep and leaves the narrator's room. Holly eventually drifts off to sleep, but gets annoyed when she starts Holly Golightlyĭescribes how a lawyer pays her $100 to speak to Sally every week. She remembered seeing this man at Joeīell's bar as a regular before he was arrested. Holly begins by telling the narrator about a man named Sally Tomato ![]()
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