My most common grammar mistake.

One of my most common grammar mistakes (and I believed it is the same for many others) is tenses. Very often when I am writing essays I would have to pause and think whether if I am using the correct tenses for some words. I will explain in this post on tenses and their usage.

Basically, tense can be divided into three main groups: Present, Past and Future. They can then be further divided into Simple, Continuous or Perfect. Simple Present tense is used to express actions or situations that always happen or habitually happen. It uses the root form of verbs (take note of plurality). For example, "The Earth spins on it's axis". Simple Past is used for events that happened in a particular time in the past and has already ended: "I played tennis yesterday". The words are usually -ed added to the root of the verbs. Finally, Simple Future is used for an events that will happen in the future: "He will be coming to class later". Normally the words 'shall' and 'will are used for Simple Future tenses.

For Present Continuous tense, it is used for events that happened in the past, are still happening and will probably continue to happen in the future. For example, "She is washing the clothes right now". Past Continuous is used for events that happened and continued in the past. It may or may not continue in the future. Example: "They were playing on the field this morning". Future Continuous tense is used for situations that had already begin to happen and will continue to happen in the future. This is used when the continuity of the event is definite as compared to Present Continuous which is just probable. "I will be watching a movie later" is an example. Note that most verbs in Continuous tenses are their root forms plus -ing at the end.

Next, we have the Perfect tenses. Perfect tenses are usually in the form of have + past participle. Present Perfect tense is for an action or situation which happened sometime in the past and had finished (no particular timing). Example: "He has already gone to bed". Past Perfect tense is use to express one event which happened before another, and both of them happened in the past: "He had already gone to bed when she came". Future Perfect tense is for events that will happen and end in the future before another event which also occurs in the future: "He will have woken up by the time she comes back".

Lastly, we have Perfect Continunous tenses. They are similiar to Perfect tenses except that they are also used to express the progress of the events (usually using duration). Examples: Present - "He has been sleeping for the past six hours"; Past - "He had been sleeping for six hours before she came"; Future - "He will have been sleeping for six hours by the time she comes back".

My main and only source of helping me to create this post are the grammar lessons from http://courses.nus.edu.sg/courseware/ITSELF. I hope you guys will have a better understanding of tenses after reading this post. I will post a simple grammar exercise on tenses in my next post.