Usually entail a balance of past-tense and present-tense verbs. In contrast to recapitulating the tales he told ("The theme of Achilles'Īnger runs throughout The Iliad.") or recording his activity as a narrator ("Homer narrates the death of Hector."). Tense ("Homer composed his epics spontaneously in performance"), So, when writing about the man, you should speak in the past Discussing Homer, not hisĮpics, calls for the past tense, because he's dead and can't come to life the This isn't necessarily true of the authors themselves, however. The vividness with which they re-occur whenever they pass through our mindsĪnd, because they're works of fiction, they can and do relive with every re-reading. Happen over and over again each time we read them. The dead." It's best in this case to use the present tense ("journeys"),īecause stories like Homer's epics exist in a timeless realm where they can Of The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus journeys to the realm of In a work of literary fiction, use the present tense: "At the midpoint Here's how to construct tenses properly for both types of paper. So, in describingĬharacters or recapitulating the plots found in literature, it's best to use Takes place in works of fiction exists in a timeless world. When the topic is literature, however, it's a different matter. Of verbs used in history papers are past-tense (e.g. In historical studies that is, by definition, in the past. The tense of the verb in a sentence reflects the time at which the action is
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