Rules For Using Past Tense

What is Past Tense?

Past tense refers to the form that verbs appear in when the action described is happening in the past, as opposed to the present or future. Many people think they know the rules for how to use past tense: if the event is in the past, add an -ed to the end of the verb. And for a lot of situations, this is the answer. For example, let's say you wanted to describe Henry and Jane walking to school:

Henry and Jane walk to school.

In this sentence, the verb 'walk' is in its present tense form, also known as its root form. For the verb 'walk,' if the event happened in the past, you would simply add -ed to the verb, creating what is called the simple pastform of the verb:

Henry and Jane walked to school yesterday.

Unfortunately, as often happens with English, not all situations are that simple. There are two big considerations to keep in mind. First, is the event in simple past or past perfect tense? And second, is the verb regular or irregular?

Simple Past and Past Perfect

Our example above is in the form of past tense known as simple past. As the name implies, it is the most basic form of past tense. If the event happened at some point in the past and nothing else is going on, use simple past.

But what if the event happened in the past, but then stopped because of some other event? For example, what if Henry and Jane had stopped walking to school at some point? Well, that is where the past perfect tense comes in:

Henry and Jane had walked to school every day this week, but this morning it was raining.

In this example, the raining had stopped Henry and Jane from walking to school, so the verb is in past perfect, which is expressed with the combination of the verb 'had' and the past participle form of 'walk', which is 'walked'.

What the Heck is a Past Participle?

But wait, didn't I say 'walked' was the simple past form of the verb? Why is it also called the past participle? Why have two different names for the same word? That's because 'walk' is a regular verb. For all regular verbs, both the simple past and past participle are just the root form with -ed at the end.

So, why have this name for past participles, the form that is used with past perfect tense (as well as present and future perfect, but that's a lesson for another day)? Because not all verbs are regular. Irregular verbs are ones whose past tense is not formed by adding -ed, and to make things more confusing, most irregular verbs have different simple past and past participle forms. When using an irregular verb in past perfect, you need to make sure you are using the past participle and not the simple past form, and vice versa.

What the Heck is an Irregular Verb?

So, now let's talk a little about irregular verbs. There are approximately 400 irregular verbs in English, too many to list here, but here are some of the most common:

Let's look at 'write' as an example. Its simple past form is 'wrote':

John wrote his grandma a letter yesterday.

But its past participle is 'written':

John had written his grandma a letter yesterday, but then he spilled coffee on it.

When you have an irregular verb, you want to make sure you are using its proper past tense form (don't just add -ed and get something like 'writed') and to make sure you are using the correct form, either the simple past or past participle.