Amo, Amas, Amat, and Running About Like Hooligans

“Amo, amas, you know, and runnin’ about like hooligans,” says Sir Ector in The Sword In The Stone, and we instinctively feel his pain and recognise one of the great truths of the writing world, drifting just beyond our ken.

Ector, if he were alive today, would no doubt have something equally trenchant to say about writers who ignore the proper conjugation of verbs. Or perhaps he’d stick to what he knew, and say, ‘Running about like hooligans’, for that is indeed what we do when we trample casually over the proper forms and ignore the structure of our language. I am seeing a great deal of unfortunate verbal behaviour in the published work of independent writers these days, and it cannot be sufficiently deplored.

However, as we know from all the management courses of the 1980s, it’s bad form to complain about a problem without offering a solution, and therefore I give you this handy guide to the conjugation of verbs.

Conjugation, what

The OED tells us that ‘A conjugation is a scheme of all the inflexional forms belonging to a verb.’ It is a kind of table, where you can read off the one you want by knowing the parameters; just as in a multiplication table you can discover, by finding the intersection of the ‘6’ column with the ‘9’ row that the product of 6 and 9 is 54 (no, Virginia, not 42), so with a proper knowledge of the conjugation table you can discover that the simple past second person singular of ‘raid’ is ‘raided’.

Let’s take a walk through the various tenses of a typical English verb: ‘to raid’. I’ve chosen this verb because it is a regular verb - its inflexions are the standard ones and there is no alteration of the root.

Root, what

The root of a verb is basically the part that doesn’t change. The various inflexions are added to it, in English, always at the end. Of course, some verbs’ roots do change - write, run, sing - the vowels change with the past tenses. There are also some highly irregular verbs in English where the whole word changes - the most common of these is ‘to go’. How these have come about is very interesting, but it’s outside the scope of this article. For our purposes, we just have to know them - whether we have our conjugation on paper and look it up, or memorise the whole thing.

Present Tense

We all know what the present tense is, right? It’s the popular resort of novice writers, particulary in the YA and porn genres. Often these people fondly imagine that writing in the present tense will be easier than in the past tense, presumably because they think that if you are writing in the present tense you can ignore all the other tenses. Guess what - you can’t.

Singular		Plural
I	raid	we	raid
you	raid	you	raid
he/she/it	raids	they	raid

The verb, as you can see, is very simple in the present tense. This is, of course, the indicative mood - I am not getting into mood and voice in this article. We are going to look at only the active voice and indicative mood today.

Simple Past Tense

The simple past tense is the most commonly used of the various past tenses. It forms our standard narrative tense. It describes actions taken and completed in the past.

Singular		Plural
I	raided	we	raided
you	raided	you	raided
he/she/it	raided	they	raided

As you can see, all of the inflexions in this tense are the same. This tense is the simplest to use, and by the way, it is also the most invisible to a reader.

Continuous Past Tense

Continuous past tense is used to describe actions taken in the past, but not completed at the time of which we are speaking. They indicate an ongoing action.

Singular		Plural
I	was raiding	we	were raiding
you	were raiding	you	were raiding
he/she/it	was raiding	they	were raiding

Here, it is the auxiliary verb to be that is inflected. You will observe that the inflexions of it are exactly the same as if the verb to be were being conjugated in the simple past tense.

Note how the second person singular inflexion is the same as all of the plural ones. There are interesting historical reasons for this, but they are outside the scope of what we are doing today.

See what I did there? What we are doing. This is the present continuous tense, the next tense we will consider.

Continuous Present Tense

Continuous present tense is used to describe actions taking place in the present which are not being immediately completed. If I say, for example, ‘I raid the Goth settlement,’ the reader knows that the raid is complete at the end of the sentence. The next sentence will be expected to deal with something that takes place after the raid. If, on the other hand, I say ‘I am raiding the Goth settlement,’ this means the raid is ongoing, and the next sentence will take place in a world where that raid is still in progress. This is rather an oversimplification, but as we are introducing the concept of conjugations, let’s stick to the basics.

Singular		Plural
I	am raiding	we	are raiding
you	are raiding	you	are raiding
he/she/it	is raiding	they	are raiding

Notice again how the root verb is in the gerund form throughout, and all of the inflexions are on the auxiliary verb to be. They are exactly the same as the present tense of the verb to be.

Future Tense

The future tense describes an action that will take place in the future, and will be completed within the time frame that is being considered.

Singular		Plural
I	will raid	we	will raid
you	will raid	you	will raid
he/she/it	will raid	they	will raid

As with the simple past tense, all of the inflexions are the same.

Future Continuous Tense

The future continuous tense describes an action that at the future time being considered will be in progress. I include it here because it is in quite common use when we speak, for instance, of our plans and schedules: On Tuesday afternoon, I will be raiding the Goth Settlement, so I can’t make lunch with Aunty Mavis.

Singular		Plural
I	will be raiding	we	will be raiding
you	will be raiding	you	will be raiding
he/she/it	will be raiding	they	will be raiding

Again, all the inflexions are the same. Note how the auxiliary verb to be is in its standard Future Tense form.

Perfect and Past Perfect tenses

These tenses are often misunderstood, and seem largely to have disappeared from the ken of many people publishing today (one hesitates to call them writers). They are used to describe actions that have completed in the past. Be aware that even if you are writing in the present tense, you will need these tenses from time to time.

Perfect Tense

The perfect tense describes an action that is already complete, but it has a stronger sense of completion than does the simple past tense. Consider the two sentences:

A) I raided the Goth settlement.

B) I have raided the Goth settlement.

In sentence A, the speaker reports an action he has taken in the past. And that’s it. In sentence B, however, he reports something more than that. He is a person who has raided a Goth settlement. It’s a subtle distinction, but a very real one.

Now consider the following conversation.

Freda: John, what about cutting the grass?

John (A): I cut the grass last Wednesday.

John (B): I have already cut the grass.

In Response A, John says that he cut the grass last Wednesday. The implication is that it does not need cutting again yet. In Response B, however, he is saying something about the immediate present. The implication is that the grass cutting has taken place within the time frame that is now under consideration - perhaps today, or this weekend. Do you see the different shades of meaning?

Singular		Plural
I	have raided	we	have raided
you	have raided	you	have raided
he/she/it	has raided	they	have raided

The perfect and past perfect tenses use the auxiliary verb to have, instead of to be. Note how the verb takes the same forms as to have takes in the simple present tense.

Past Perfect Tense

This is the last tense we will consider today, but it is a very important one. The past perfect tense describes a completed action that was already completed in the past at a past time that is being considered.

Singular		Plural
I	had raided	we	had raided
you	had raided	you	had raided
he/she/it	had raided	they	had raided

This tense is vital if your narrative is in simple past tense. There will be times when you wish to refer to a past - that is, a time that is in the past from the point of view of your narrative. Because the ‘present’ in your simple past narrative is being written in the past tense, if you want to talk about something that is, for example, already past to your point-of-view character, you need this tense.

Consider the following:

Joe sank into his chair and slumped onto the desk. He had covered the entire district on foot, but nowhere had anyone heard news of Bad Mal.

In this example, the narrative is in simple past tense (Joe sank into his chair). Therefore, when he considers his actions earlier that day, the simple past tense cannot be used, for it is analogous to the present in our narrative.

Let’s take a look at the sentence without past perfect tense.

Joe sank into his chair and slumped onto the desk. He covered the entire district on foot, but nowhere did anyone hear news of Bad Mal.

How stupid does this look? It conjures up images of Joe covering the district on foot while seated at his desk, which is a nonsense. There are few errors that will make you look more incompetent than failing to employ the appropriate tense.

That’s All For Now

There are plenty more tenses in the English language, but these eight will cover most of what you will use from day to day. Further variations are provided by passive voice and imperative and subjunctive moods, but we must leave consideration of these interesting and fun features of our language for another time.   

Pitfalls in Sentence Construction - the toxic 'When'.

Today I’m going to address something that is a very common problem among less experienced writers: the problems that can arise when ‘when’ is used as a conjunction.

Conjunctions, what

A conjunction is a word that is used to connect two elements within a sentence. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the word can also mean sexual intercourse, and this is strangely apposite considering the unhappy results when conjunctions are used inappropriately.

How Conjunctions work

In the most basic form of conjunction use, you have two short sentences and you wish to combine them into a single sentence.

EG:                                                      

The cat sat on the mat.

The cat started to wash his paws.

In this most basic example, the obvious choice of conjunction is ‘and’ -

The cat sat on the mat AND started to wash his paws.

Note how the subject has been omitted from the second part, because it already appears in the first part.

Subordinating Conjunctions 

There are a great many conjunctions available in English, and they serve various purposes, but today we are going to talk about the use of ‘WHEN’. ‘When’ is a particular type of conjunction known as a Subordinating Conjunction. This means that when you tie two elements together with it, one of them is subordinate to the other.

Here is an example of a subordinating conjunction in action:

While Tom was in the kitchen, Boris stole the lavatory paper.

In this sentence, the main clause is ‘Boris stole the lavatory paper.’ This sentence could stand alone. The subordinate clause serves to modify the main clause. It gives us more information about Boris stealing the lavatory paper (he did it while Tom was in the kitchen). Note how the conjunction (while) doesn’t need to go between the two parts of the sentence. 'While' is a subordinating conjunction, and it serves to introduce the subordinate clause as well as to link the two clauses, so it goes with the subordinate clause (Tom was in the kitchen). You could also write this sentence as ‘Boris stole the lavatory paper while Tom was in the kitchen.’

Particular Requirements of WHEN

Because ‘when’ is a word concerned with time, it has special features in a sentence. Used to join two clauses, it tells us that time is in some way relevant to the relationship between the two elements. In the example above, the information added by the subordinate clause is time information - it answers the question ‘when did Boris steal the lavatory paper?’

Because of the fact that elements connected by ‘when’ are related by time, this conjunction often serves to introduce a causal relationship as well. Although causality is not a necessary feature of sequence, when a story is being told it is often an incidental feature of it. Take, for example, the form ‘A when B’. On its face, this form does not express any causal link. When it is particularised, however, such a link will often, although not always, form.

Consider the following sentence:

“I hit the bear over the head when he tried to take my sandwich.”

In this sentence, as well as placing the act of hitting the bear in a time context (it happened after he attempted to take the sandwich), there is a causal link established, as the action of hitting the bear is clearly a result of his attempted predation. Were this not the case, we’d write the sentence some other way, giving more emphasis to the time element. We might say something like “The bear had already eaten all the fruit and was reaching for my sandwich when I hit him.” In that sentence, it is not at all clear why the person hit the bear; he might have been stalking him anyway.

A similar, but different form is when the sentence describes not two actions related in time, but an action and a state of affairs - an action that is not completed, but is still going on.

“I was eating my lunch when the bear jumped out of the bush.”

Here we have the main clause describing an action (‘the bear jumped out of the bush’) and the subordinate clause describes a state of affairs that obtained at the time the action took place (‘I was eating my lunch.’) The eating of lunch was still ongoing and had not been completed.

Now there is nothing wrong with either of these forms, but where people get into trouble is when the wrong one is chosen. A lack of proper understanding of the structure of verbs can lead the novice writer to say, instead of the above, the following:

“I eat my lunch when the bear jumps out of the bush.”

The image conjured is risible. “Hop to and eat your lunch, Johnny, before the bear gets it,” one can imagine his mother saying. Do you see? This sentence is telling us that he eats his lunch after, and because of, the bear jumping out of the bush, which is a nonsense.

Which Form To Use

Which of these two forms you use will depend largely on whether you wish to show a causal relationship between the two events, or merely one of time.

Take, for example, the following two events:

1) A cat walks into the room.

2) Rodney screams.

On the face of it, we do not know in what order these events take place; nor do we know whether one event is caused by the other.

To join these two clauses into a sentence using ‘when’, there are four possible combinations using the forms shown above.

1. Rodney screamed when the cat walked into the room.

Here, Rodney’s scream is a response to the cat’s entry. Perhaps Rodney is an ailurophobe, or the cat is a panther.

2. The cat walked into the room when Rodney screamed.

Here, the cat’s entry is a response to Rodney’s scream. Perhaps it is Rodney’s cat and its entry is motivated by concern.

3. The cat was walking into the room when Rodney screamed.

Here, the cat is in the act of entering the room when Rodney screams, but his scream is not caused by the cat. Perhaps he has had bad news on the telephone, or he is suffering from the D.T.s.

4. Rodney was screaming when the cat walked into the room.

Rodney is already screaming at the time of the cat’s entry, but the cat’s entry is probably not a response to this. Not certainly, because who can say with cats? But the sentence does not tell us that it is.

English 101 - The Very Basics

What You Need To Know

I shouldn’t even need to be mentioning this stuff in a blog about writing. That’s what I think. However, the amount of utter rubbish I see published informs me otherwise. Now that self-publishing is really a thing, lots of people of whom we would never have heard before are deciding to be authors. And, to be fair, a lot of them can write. A greater number, although barely literate, if that, do still have a story to tell. Who are we to say they may not publish their work just as well as anyone else?

If you are one of these people, with a good story to tell, and perhaps you even have that indefinable gift of making the pages keep turning, which is the hallmark of a writer, it’s still no good unless you can translate the wonderful story in your mind into something that people can actually read, and read with pleasure. Yes, you have the right to self-publish your first draft in barely comprehensible language. But why would you want to? See my post of 9 January.

So, as with any craft, writing has its set of ‘tools’ that are essential. Just as you wouldn’t get far knitting unless you had some needles and yarn, so you cannot go far as a writer without the basic tools of language. And, as with the needles and yarn, it’s not enough just to have them - you have to know how to use them, so with the English language (or any other language in which you might be writing, of course, but I am talking about English here).

A detailed exposition of all the rules of English grammar is beyond the scope of this article. Below are listed the basic elements with which you need to be familiar. This is, if you like, your ‘starter kit’.

Parts of speech.

For any word, you need to be able to say what part of speech it is. Noun, verb, pronoun, adverb and so on. Even if it is a word you have not seen before. You need to know this because, unless you know what part of speech a word is, you will not know how it may, or may not, be used.

Getting your parts of speech wrong can result in things like this:

Rover was an old dog with brown colour fur.

or this:

He had been kicked out of his home for vomit on the carpet.

or even this:

Because he was homeless, Rover went to the rubbish tip everyday to look for  food.

Enough said? Yes, I thought so.

One Word/Two Word Pairs

Many pairs of words can be written either as two separate words (“every day”) or as a single word (“everyday”). It is extremely important to understand the difference between the two. A two-word pair and a single, joined word are not interchangeable, and cannot be used as if they were.

The reason for this is that the single word and the phrase, although their meanings are nearly always related, are different parts of speech. In our example, for instance, “every day” is an adverbial phrase meaning “daily”, whereas the single word “everyday” is an adjective meaning ordinary. Similarly, “login” is a noun, “log in” a verb clause.

In order to navigate these pairs safely, your best guide is a sound understanding of what part of speech each is.

Conjugations.

You must know how to conjugate verbs, both regular and irregular. This is absolutely vital.

If you do not understand the structure of a verb’s conjugation, you are liable to write something like this:

Rover looked around the rubbish tip, and in one corner he seen a dead rat.

or this:

Rover don’t like rat much, but that day it was all he can find.

or even this:

Within two seconds, Rover eated the rat.

Agreement.

You need to know which words are required to agree with each other, and how to achieve that happy state.

Failure of agreement can result in this:

Looking up from his rat meal, Rover notices his two friends, Spot and Fluffy, entering the tip. Neither Spot nor Fluffy have a home either.

or this:

Rover, Spot and Fluffy started to dig for bones. As soon as anyone dug up a bone, they ate it.

or even:

None of them were entirely free of fleas.

Articles

You must be able to use articles correctly. Errors in the use of articles don’t generally compromise your meaning, but they do tend to make your sentence look like a bad translation from Italian. You will lose your reader’s respect if you say things like:

Rover made decision to seek out his family.

Fluffy loved to hunt a mice, but in this neighbourhood there were more the rats than the mice.

Spot went along with the Rover and the Fluffy to hunt an rats.

Mass Nouns and Count Nouns

It is vital that you understand the distinction between mass nouns and count nouns, and the difference in their use, both in terms of stating quantities and in the use of articles. Talking, for instance, about “less people” will just make you look silly.

How To Know If You Need Help

If any of the above terms is unfamiliar to you, or doesn’t make sense, or you lack the basic knowledge described, then your English is at the remedial level, and if you want to write, you need to address this, and as soon as possible.

What To Do About It.

The following is a list of suggestions for addressing deficiencies in your written English. If you’re serious about it, your course of action should include at least one choice from List 1.

1. Educate yourself.

The best and most reliable option. It does take time, but if you are serious about writing it is worth the time and the effort. There are various options for doing this; you might consider the following, separately or all together:

1. Go back to school (I). Look for a course called Remedial English Grammar, or something along those lines.

2. Go back to school (II). Enrol for a couple of semesters of university Latin. This will do you enormous good. Do not email me asking why studying Latin improves your English.  It does. Take my word for it.

3. Hire a private tutor to bring you up to speed. This option can work well if you find the right person. If cost is a problem, consider barter; depending on what skills you have yourself, you might be able to organise to have a student tutor you in return for some service you can provide.  

4. If money is really tight and you can’t organise a barter arrangement, as a measure of desperation you could try doing it yourself using internet resources and books from the library. I don’t recommend this, though, unless there is really no other way. Self-study without guidance can result in skimming over material without really digging into it, and in the case of complex material, in fundamental misunderstandings. You are far better off with a teacher or tutor.

2. Read.

Read the good stuff, the classics. Declare a moratorium on rubbish and get reacquainted with Austen, Trollope, Dickens, Stevenson, Conrad, Wilde. If you are writing, you should be reading a great deal in any case.

3. Use your editor.

If you’ve already written your book and only now realise your grammar needs work, this is something with which a good editor can help you. When choosing an editor, make sure you get a good one. Ask other authors for their recommendations. Don’t just hire someone who spammed you. Find an editor who is willing to work with a remedial client, and be prepared to pay a bit over the odds, because that editor is going to be putting in far more work than he would do with an ordinary client.

In any case, you will need a good editor even if you are not a remedial case. An editor is an indispensable part of the publication process. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can do without one.