We thus should cultivate the art of avoiding announced shifts in voice, tense, person, and number in our writing, and of spotting and eliminating them every time they creep into our prose. The first thing to guard against are unnecessary shifts from the active to the passive voice. Such tense shifts give the same feeling as a movie jerking and rewinding to past scenes, or lurching fast-forward to future scenes. In fact, it's in the perfect tenses that tense shifts become mandatory: "The package we had waited for all week finally arrived this morning." Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times: "The art of avoiding voice shifts"Next, Aug. 24, 2023: The curse of overloaded sentencesVisit Jose Carillo's English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com.

Source: Manila Times August 16, 2023 16:34 UTC