Page 172 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

158 CHAPTER 7
o To correct these types of errors, a past time adverbial marker needs to be inserted to reframe the context for the present time and tense (e.g., Last quarter, student studied hard, and now he gets
good grades').
• In other occurrences of mixed present and past tenses, one verb may refer to an activity that takes place in the general present, but another verb denotes a past-tense activity (e.g., *When the market moves up and down every day, thefund manager issued a new policy). In this sentence, both tenses—present and past—are used logically: The market moves every day refers to an action that is generally true, whereas the fund manager took a onetime, past-tense action to is- sue a new policy. In this case, the inconsistent use of tenses can be corrected in two ways:
(1) by inserting an adverbial or other marker (such as an adjec- tive) to reframe the context for a different tense (and time) as dis- cussed earlier, or
(2) by changing the past tense to the general present tense to match the other verb(s) (e.g., When the market moves up and down every day, thefund manager issues a new policy).
The problem with merely changing the tense of the verb, as in (2),is this correction may appear factually untruthful to the writer—if it is known that the past time action of the manager's issuing a new policy is a factual past time event.
It is important to emphasize that the uses of the general present tense are highly conventionalized in academicwriting in English and that the verb tenses must meet the requirements of the conventions even when they may appear to be somewhat factually incorrect.
The following extended example demonstrates various inconsistent uses of tenses in an excerpt from a student's paper on efficiency in public administration:
Every country in the world has [simple present] many problems such aspollution, unemployment, crime, war, and so on. And in most modern countries, the government takes [simple present] a role tosolve theseproblems. It w[simple present] due tothe
fact that any individual or organization can't afford [simple present] to manage costs to do this. As society becomes [simple present] more complicated, the government ex- panded [simple past] its role dramatically.
Thefundamental services, which we use [simple present] every day such as water, gas, electricity, public transportation were produced [simple past] by individual ven- dors. But there was [simple past] a critical problem with these individual suppliers, and in industrial societies the government provides [simple past] these services. Itis_
TLFeBOOK