Does verb tense give you tension? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) In this blog entry, we will quickly overview verb tenses and note some stylistic rules of thumb.

I recently read a good short story, "Dry Whiskey" by David B. Silva (The Best American Mystery Stories 1999, ed. Ed McBain). The story builds unassumingly to a subtly powerful ending. However, the author struggles with the use of past perfect tense, enough so that it interferes with a smooth reading experience.

Past perfect tense is formed by combining the auxiliary verb had with a verb's past participle (had written, for example).

Know what a verb is? Let’s review anyway. A verb is a word that expresses action (example: expresses) or a state of being (example: is).

Of course, it's not always that simple. For example, which is the verb in the following sentence? Talking makes me tired. It would be easy to mistake the noun form of talk (talking) for a verb.

A friend who minored in linguistics and is an English professor taught me this clever trick for identifying verbs in a sentence.