Grammar Basics: What Are Verb Tenses?

Verb tenses are forms of verbs that show whether we are talking about the past, present, or future. There are six classical tenses in English and an additional six tenses that are categorized as “perfect tenses.”

The classical tenses, using the verb “walk” as an example, are: Present simple (I walk) Present continuous ( I am walking)

Simple past (I walked) Past continuous (I was walking)

Simple future (I will walk) Future continuous (I will be walking)

The perfect tenses, using walk as an example, are:

Present perfect (I have walked) Present perfect continuous (I have been walking)

Past perfect (I had walked) Past perfect continuous (I had been walking)

Future perfect (I will have walked) Future perfect continuous (I will have been walking)

Many verbs, like “make,” “do,” “see,” and “be” are irregular in the past and perfect tenses, which means that they do not look like the regular verb “walk” when conjugated.

To learn more about grammar and to help us celebrate National Grammar Day this March, visit our new resource page.

7 Ways to Motivate Yourself When You’re Exhausted

Romeo and Juliet, peanut butter and jelly. . . some combinations just seem to go together. Deadlines and exhaustion, on the other hand, are a pair that no one likes to experience. What do you do when you are confronted with that undesirable duo? Put up a fight with these seven motivating tactics.

Break your task into smaller steps.

If someone told you to do an online search for a blueprint for a house, you would skip off to your computer without a care in the world. However, if you were asked to build a house, you might exclaim “I can’t do that!” Why is searching for a blueprint less intimidating than building a house? After all, finding the right design is the first step of construction.

In 1981, Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk tested two groups of children. Researchers told one set of children to finish forty-two pages of math problems in seven sessions. The second group’s instructions suggested they complete six pages of math problems each session for seven days. What were the results? Not only did the children with smaller subgoals complete their problems faster, they also answered correctly 40 percent more frequently.

Subsequent studies replicated the same results with adults. What do you learn? Thinking about the whole project is overwhelming, but you can boost your confidence and get more done if you divide the task into manageable chunks.

Put it in writing.

Okay, you’ve broken your project down into substeps. What now? Psychologists have long agreed that writing down goals helps people to accomplish them. Recently, Dr. Gail Matthews of Dominican University in California wanted to know how effective goal-writing is. She tested hundreds of participants. The findings indicated that writing down goals increases your likelihood of achieving them by about 42 percent.

According to author Michael Hyatt, there are at least five benefits of writing down your objectives:

• Articulating your objectives forces you to clarify them.
• If your goals are in writing, you can regularly review them, which will remind you to “take the next most important action.”
• You can use your goals to see whether things that come up are opportunities to further your progress or distractions that should be avoided.
• Seeing your goal in writing focuses you on what you need to do, not what obstacles might stand in your way.
• Finally, reviewing the steps that you’ve already completed will encourage you and show you how much closer you are to your goal than when you started.

Tell your supporters.

In this digital age, telling others about your plans with others is easy. Share your goal on social media. Provide regular status updates, including your struggles and setbacks. Likely, your family, friends, and colleagues would welcome a chance to celebrate your advancements and give you advice on how to overcome setbacks. If you are serious about your goal, you will appreciate it when they hold you accountable for your promises. Just knowing that the people who are important to you are rooting for you can motivate you to keep trying.

Visualize.

One Australian psychologist wanted to know if visualization could help basketball players improve their game. He measured how many free throws each player could successfully score in a brief period of time. Then, he divided the players into three groups. One group had to practice throwing free throws for twenty minutes each day. Another group only visualized themselves sinking free throws; they weren’t allowed any real practice. A third group didn’t practice or visualize free throws.

In a real-life trial, players who only visualized improved almost as much as the group who practiced! Why does visualization work? Brain imagery shows the same neuron action in the brain when someone creates mental images and when someone performs a task. When you feel tired, take a few moments to picture yourself completing all of the steps of your project. View the scene in detail—the sights, the smells, the feeling of pride. What positive outcomes will result at the project’s end? How will you celebrate? You should start to feel better in no time.

Put on your dancing shoes.

As reported in Psychology Today, listening to music changes your perception of the world. Studies indicate the music “engages a wide range of neurobiological systems that affect our psychology.” To illustrate, researchers played either happy or sad music to test subjects. While listening, the subjects had to identify emoticons as happy or sad.

What happened when researchers presented a neutral face (without a smile or a frown)? Amazingly, subjects listening to sad music identified the ‘neutral’ faces as sad and subjects listening to happy music identified the same face as happy. If you want to affect your mood, why not play some upbeat, energizing music while you work or during your break?

Take a break.

Slumping exhausted in front of a television screen does not count as taking a proper break. What appeals to you most—a power nap, a day trip to the mountains, or a relaxing dinner with your mate? It doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is that you truly relax by doing something that refreshes you. When you return to work, you will be ready to press on.

Stop and smell the roses.

Aromatherapy is the use of plant extracts or essential oils to improve health or relaxation. According to an article in Entrepreneur, of all our senses, smell is particularly effective in influencing brain activity. Beverly Hawkins, owner of the West Coast Institute of Aromatherapy, explains that olfactory bulbs “are part of the limbic system and directly connect to the areas of the brain that process emotion and learning.” To benefit, all you have to do is put a small amount of essential oil on a cotton ball. Then, take a sniff or two when you feel tired. However, any old smell won’t do. Hawkins recommends one of six scents—lemon for increased concentration and relaxation, lavender for stress relief, jasmine for lifting your mood, rosemary for fighting physical and mental fatigue, cinnamon for focus, or peppermint for energy.

If you’re feeling exhaustion, it may seem impossible to continue working. Don’t give up. If you take a moment to motivate yourself with one of these seven methods, you will be back in the swing of things before you know it. Which technique will you try first?

Past Perfect Continuous Tense

The past perfect continuous tense (also known as the past perfect progressive tense) shows that an action that started in the past continued up until another time in the past. The past perfect continuous tense is constructed using had been + the verb’s present participle (root + -ing).

Unlike the present perfect continuous, which indicates an action that began in the past and continued up to the present, the past perfect continuous is a verb tense that indicates something that began in the past, continued in the past, and also ended at a defined point in the past.

He had been drinking milk out the carton when Mom walked into the kitchen.

I had been working at the company for five years when I got the promotion.

When, for, since, and before are words that you may see used alongside the past perfect continuous tense.

Martha had been walking three miles a day before she broke her leg.

The program that was terminated had been working well since 1945.

Cathy had been playing the piano for 35 years when she was finally asked to do a solo with the local orchestra.

He had been throwing rocks at her window for five minutes before she finally came out on the balcony and said, “Hey, Romeo.”

5 Grammar Pet Peeves

Every grammarian has a list of grammar pet peeves. We compile new lists every year. However, some errors are insidiously persistent. Like coffee stains on a snow-white rug, we cannot seem to scrub them away no matter how hard we try. But we must keep up the fight.

Join us as we again leap into the fray against our arch-nemesis: the most-common-glaring-grammar-errors-of-all-time.

Your/You’re: This one has a longer lifespan than Dracula. We’ve hunted it like a pack of wild dogs, and its demise continues to elude us. Okay, we understand, it is easy to forget an apostrophe when you’re in a hurry. But, please, your reputation is at stake: “your” is a possessive pronoun and “you’re” is a contraction of “you are.”

There/Their/They’re: As long as we’re working with monster metaphors, we’ll call this one the hydra. No matter how many times you manage to lop off the creature’s head, it constantly regenerates. Sometimes we can empathize with this particular error. With three different choices, and the same pronunciation for each, mistakes happen. So, let’s go through them again and see if you can pass the quiz.

• “There” is used to reference a place. For example: “I walked over there.” It is also used with a “to be” verb, to show the existence of something or to reference something. Examples: “There are seven stones,” and “There are never enough hours in the day.”
• “Their” is an adjective that shows possession. It shows that an object belongs to “them.” For example: “They have lost their marbles.”
• “They’re” is a contraction. That’s all it is. A simple abbreviation of a subject and a verb: “they are.”

It’s/Its: By this point, it should come as no surprise that the most common grammar errors involve homophones. The “its/it’s” error bubbles to the surface constantly, like some stubborn kudzu in a flower garden. Let’s bend down again, and try to weed this one out.

• “It’s” is another contraction. It is used in no other way. The word is short for “it is” or “it has.” If you expand it to one of those two phrases in a sentence, and it doesn’t make sense, then it has been used incorrectly. Examples include: “it’s the only way” and “it’s been a long time.”
• “Its” is a neutral, possessive pronoun. Use it to show possession when the gender of the noun is unclear. For instance: “The mountain has a lake at its base.”

Which/That: This incredibly common error continues to plague grammarians. “That” is a restrictive pronoun. Without it, the sentence either makes no sense, or does not make the sense that the writer intended. For example: “I do not like grammar that is incorrect.” The precise sense of this sentence depends on “that.” Otherwise, it just seems that “I do not like grammar.”

The word “which” is used to begin a clause that is related to the sentence, but not necessary to its understanding. To refer to our earlier example, if we were to write: “I do not like grammar, which is incorrect,” the sentence would lose its essential meaning. The correct use of “which” in this instance is: “I do not like grammar that is incorrect, which is fine by me.”

Subject/Verb Agreement: A basic sentence contains a subject and a verb. Someone is doing something. However, if that someone becomes plural, then the verb had better agree.

“I am writing” is correct.

“I are writing” is not.

Sometimes a phrase pops up in the middle, though, and things can get a bit more complicated. Don’t be fooled, however.

“The man who whistles constantly is creepy” is correct.

“The man who whistles constantly are creepy” is not.

What are some of the most common that you encounter?

“Where do you do it?” Meme Generators

Do you want to help us spread awareness for writing, GrammoWriMo, and NaNoWriMo? Or maybe you just want to show some of your writer-pride? Either way, we’ve put together a special meme for you to customize with your own #IDoIt caption.

To create your own #IDoIt meme to share on Facebook, Twitter, your blog and other social media channels, follow the instructions below:

1. Choose whether you would like a male image or a female image.

                       

2. Once you are on the meme page, enter your meme text in the “top text” field. Meme text should follow the format “I do it in the mall/ at the library/ with friends/ etc.”

3. When you finalize your text, edit your font by selecting ‘Arial’ from the drop down and clicking the ‘no caps’ button.

4. Reposition the text box to the middle of the image by clicking and dragging.

5. Click “Generate” to publish your meme as a public or private meme. (Public memes can more easily be shared on social channels. Both are anonymous, unless you create an account.)

6. Share your fun, new image! Be sure to tag Grammarly so that we can see all the fun places where our friends write!