I’m editing a manuscript for a professor and I just noticed that he often mixes the past and present tense in his lit reviews. For example, in one sentence he’ll write:
“Jon and Doe (1981) suggest that vendor stability is a key factor to consider.”
In the *very *next sentence he’ll write:
“Jones (1989) suggested that firms consider the vendor reputation as
one of the most important factors.”
(I’m just making up these sentences to give an example).
I know this mixing is probably stylistically wrong, but it doesn’t make my skin crawl as much as, say, subject-verb agreement or parallel construction problems would.
Why is that? Is it technically wrong, but people do it so often that it looks right to me? Is it a big deal?
Let’s assume that the target publication is a scholarly business journal (so, probably APA or Chicago )
Formal prose convention dictates that present tense is used when discussing what somebody wrote. I’ve been proofreading papers for a friend quite a lot recently and she mixes past and present tense without even realizing she’s doing it. It’s just a bad habit some people have, I think.
Does this apply regardless of the age of the citation? In other words, a cite from Doe from 1965 should still, formally, be “Doe (1965) suggests” rather than “Doe (1965) suggested”?
Also, I assume that all perfect versions of the past tense are incorrect? For example, “had found,” “had discovered,” “has found,” “has discovered” are also not correct? These are past perfect, right?
When you’re talking about the actions of the person, not their writing you would use the past tense (ie “Darwin studied animals on the Galapagos” not “studies”). I’m kind of confused by this question but I would still use the present tense if it’s something specifically in the writing.
Thanks, Electric Warrior, for continuing to return to this thread. So far, I guess it’s just me and you
What I was getting at with the last question is how to refer to the results of a study that another author conducted and whether that also needed to be in present tense.
Here’s a real example from the paper:
(bolding mine)
Now, from your last post, I gather that “discovered” would be okay, because it describes the actions of a person. But if that’s true, it seems weird to switch to the present tense in the next sentence with “suggests.”[/FONT]
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I feel like the problem in that paper isn’t just the tenses, it’s the wording. If the writer is discussing the results of a paper, then means you can’t actually discover a clear connection between anything; you can only find evidence that supports a hypothesis.
A more appropriate wording would be something like “Chin (2005) suggests a connection between customer relationship management and its ability to enhance the operations management value chain.” Or even “A study by Chin (2005) supports a connection between…” Since I used ‘suggests’ in the first sentence, I’d then change the verb in the second sentence to ‘advises’ if that’s what the author means, or if the author means ‘suggests’ in the sense of “shows data that seem to support”, just start immediately with whatever it is that Chin’s data is showing.
Without going into the issue of whether it’s acceptable to say “discovered” in the first place, I’d like to suggest (hehe) that
“Chin (2005) discovered a clear connection between customer relationship management and its ability to enhance the operations management value chain. He suggests that (blah blah blah)”
is a perfectly valid construction, regardless of the time elapsed between the discovery and the suggestion. If I were to say, “Last week, Smith discovered a new species of Euphorbia. He suggests that it is related to…”, it would also be correct. It all comes down to the rule of actions in the past tense and statements in the present. I’ve never considered this in terms of rules before; thanks for a thought-provoking question!
PsyXe, I agree - sorry for not being very clear in my previous post, I had just woken up. If the discovery and the suggestion aren’t both in the same paper, the original construction works fine. However, I’d be confused as to why the author put “Chin (2005) discovered” rather than something like “Harold Chin discovered blah blah blah. In a 2005 article/study/paper/title/whatever, he suggests that…”
(And no, I have no idea whether Chin’s first name is Harold.)
I believe the convention is that experimental procedures and research findings are typically described in the past or present perfect tense, and discussions and conclusions are typically referred to in the present tense. However, the APA Publication Manual also says to avoid sudden, unnecessary shifts in verb tense, so it can be a tough call sometimes.
Formally, is “Jones (1989)” the name of a person called Jones, or a paper published in 1989? “Suggested” makes sense in reference to the person, “Suggests” makes sense in reference to the paper.
I haven’t actually read the papers being cited in the manuscript I’m reviewing, but most of the literature cited will have been papers that have conducted experiments and are reporting results and making recommendations in the conclusion section of the paper.
So, I would imagine, Jones is making a suggestion about something in the discussion section of the paper after conducting research that supports his/her conclusions, also in that same paper.
ETA: I’m reviewing the paper for grammar and style only, not for content. The professor is Chinese and sometimes has difficulty with constructing English sentences.
But if you were to say something like “Jones (1989) is 116 pages long,” or “Does anyone have a copy of Jones (1989)?” are you using it in the same sense? The distinction might be important because the paper will always suggest the same thing, whereas the author can die or change his mind. If you read “Jones (1889) suggests,” the present tense is valid for the text but not the author.
