Present Narrative Tense: Tell Your Story in the Present

English tenses are difficult to navigate, because both mood and meaning are acutely sensitive to verb forms. This article shows the basics of how to use the present narrative tense of your manuscript.

When writing a research article, my three guidelines on tenses are:

1. Use the present narrative tense. The simple present makes statements intended to be true regardless of time and without any stance. The present perfect relates a past situation/action to the present situation/result. As the narrative tense, the present accommodates the past tense and all modal verb usage seamlessly.
2. Use the past tense only when referring to a specific past that’s either: wrong/no longer relevant, or of actual historical interest (e.g., when writing a review article).
3. Use modal verbs only when the situation requires a specific stance. In academic prose, this usually means (cap)ability (can) or future time (will), rather than degree of (un)certainty, permission, necessity, or obligation (may, might, could, should, must, etc.).

The frequency distribution of the present-tense (70 %), past-tense (20 %), and modal verbs (10 %) in the academic-prose register of the English corpus supports this approach (right-most bar in chart).

Confusion will set in as soon as you start switching between the present and the past for the wrong reason. Adding passive voice to the mix will make things even worse. When this happens, my advice is:

• (re)write in the active voice,
• change all tenses to the present, and
• touch up with past or modal verbs where necessary.

Makeover of a Famous Article Excerpt

Note: following I use single (double) underline to highlight active (passive) verbs. I use blue, yellow, green, and grey to highlight present tense, past tense, modal, and non-finite verbs, respectively, where useful.

Consider the following example (Saiki, 1988):

①A thermostable DNA polymerase was used in an in vitro DNA amplification procedure, the polymerase chain reaction. The enzyme, isolated from Thermus aquaticus, ②greatly simplifies the procedure and, ③by enabling the amplification reaction to be performed at higher temperatures, ④significantly improves the specificity, yield, sensitivity, and length of products that can be amplified. ⑤Single-copy genomic sequences were amplified by a factor of more than 10 million with very high specificity, and ⑥DNA segments up to 2000 base pairs were readily amplified. In addition, ⑦the method was used to amplify and detect a target DNA molecule present only once in a sample of 105 cells.

The abstract begins with idea ① using the past tense, suggesting the narrative tense of the abstract. This forces the reader to refocus to the present in ②, and then back to the past in ⑤.

Idea ③ uses the nonfinite verb “enabling,” reducing the significance of the enzyme’s role in the experiment.

These problems are all related to the use of the passive voice, which was intended to avoid personal pronouns. Note that all passive-voice sentences are in the past, while the active-voice sentences are in the present. Why the authors chose to switch tenses is unclear at this point.

Rewriting Using the Active Voice

①We (have) used a thermostable polymerase enzyme to improve the known polymerase chain reaction in vitro DNA amplification. ③The new enzyme enables higher temperature amplification, which ②simplifies the overall procedure and ④enhances the specificity, yield, sensitivity and length of the target product. ⑤We (have) achieved single-copy genomic sequence amplification of ⑥up to 2000 base pairs by a factor of more than 10 million with very high specificity. ⑦We (have) demonstrated this by detecting the presence of a single target DNA molecule in a sample of 105 cells.

This rewrite reveals the authors used the past tense to relate their past actions to the current results (as in “we have achieved”). The “(have)s” show that the past tenses can be written in the present perfect instead, to convey the same time information in the present narrative tense. The (have)s also demonstrate how the present perfect is easily confused with the simple past. The verb in ③ is changed to the simple present and rewritten as the first verb of the sentence to highlight the role of the enzyme as the key technical advance of this work.

Touch Up with Present Narrative Tense

The time information conveyed above by the simple past/present perfect is redundant. Here I switch all verbs to the simple present. Note that I choose to highlight the new method’s capability using the modal “can amplify,” but the simple present “amplifies” also works. This last point is a matter of preference.

①We use a thermostable polymerase enzyme to improve the known polymerase chain reaction in vitro DNA amplification. ③The new enzyme enables higher temperature amplification, which ②simplifies the overall procedure and ④enhances the specificity, yield, sensitivity and length of the target product. ⑤Our new method can amplify single-copy genomic sequences of ⑥up to 2000 base pairs by a factor of more than 10 million with very high specificity. ⑦We demonstrate this by detecting the presence of a single target DNA molecule in a sample of 105 cells.

Takeaways from the Rewrites

Being consistent is key. Switching for no reason between past and present (original version), or even between present perfect and simple present (first rewrite) is distracting—like a camera zooming in and out of the subject while you’re trying to see what the subject is. Consistent use of the simple present (final touch up) lets the reader take in the whole picture. 

The past narrative tense has a stance. Let’s try switching the narrative tense of our final touch up from the present to the past:

①We used a thermostable polymerase enzyme to improve the known polymerase chain reaction in vitro DNA amplification. ③The new enzyme enabled higher temperature amplification, which ②simplified the overall procedure and ④enhanced the specificity, yield, sensitivity and length of the target product. ⑤Our new method could amplify single-copy genomic sequences of ⑥up to 2000 base pairs by a factor of more than 10 million with very high specificity. ⑦We demonstrated this by detecting the presence of a single target DNA molecule in a sample of 105 cells.

The new tense states the exact same truths as the final touch up, but exclusively in some past. This stance makes the abstract sound more like a Conclusions section. Even I didn’t expect this effect before writing it out.

Passive voice makes everything more difficult including verb-tense usage. Just write in the active voice. It will save you time and grief.

Conclusions

Academic prose requires strict tense usage. Write everything in the present then adjust the stance accordingly. Adding time information with the past is usually redundant.

Works Consulted

Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad S. and Finegan E. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman, 1999, p. 456.

Saiki R.K., Gelfand D.H., Stoffel S., Scharf S.J., Higuchi R., Horn G.T., Mullis K.B. and Erlich H.A. Primer-directed enzymatic amplification of DNA with a thermostable DNA polymerase. Science 239 (1988), 487-91.