Hello Everyone,

I'm currently making amendments to my chapters, and am very confused about whether things should be in the present or past tense (i.e. he asserts 'apples are good' OR he asserted 'apples are good').

The thing is, on the chapter I'm currently working on, my supervisor has said by a couple of paragraphs that I should put what I'm saying in past tense (because the studies were written a long time ago), but not done this by other paragraphs/work (which were also written a long time ago).

Is there a rule about tenses??? Is it grammatically wrong to put everything in past tense, or would you just put what your supervisor has commented on in past tense???

I've flicked through some books and noticed that people seem to chop and change sporadically!

Argh!!!

This is quite a tricky one actually! I think you'd use the past tense if you were quite clear this wasn't current thinking any more and were looking at the ideas in the context of the past, perhaps? So, like "In their classic study X et al noted..." rather than "X et al conclude..." That's the message I think you'd be giving if you switched tenses. Another distinction I'd make (I'm studying English) is between textual analysis and biographical or historical info, so (as a rather crappy eg.) when you're talking about poems in Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and Coleridge are still in the present, but when you're talking about what they thought about pantheism in general they're in the past. Apologies for vagueness, I'm intrigued about how rules for this might work.

I agree with alicepalace... basically, identifying cited material in the past tense suggests that something has since superceded the material... whereas representing cited material in the present tense suggests that the theories is current and still holds true, hasn't changed, etc.

Are you talking about your own work too. I've reported my results in the past tense, but have been using future tense to say what results I am going to discuss in the chapter.
To be confusing I've used past tense to describe other people's work, including Blogs et al. proposed that ....for theories as it has been previously been reported in the literature at a specific date. I've not been taught this, it's just what I've done.
For theories that have not been published, that I'm testing, I report in the present tense. Blogs proposes that....

Writing about your own work, I tend to explain how my methods etc work using present tense but results are discussed in past tense.

Hi All,

Thanks for your responses. I discuss my own findings in past tense, so am really trying to work out what tense to use when discussing other peoples work.

Argh - it's confusing.

My supervisor has said strictly speaking everything should be past tense, but sometimes it reads better if things are present (i.e. work done within the last 5 years or so).

Any other opinions on this would be greatly appreciated.

I wrote past tense for everything, I think. My methods were "Following incubation, 200uL of solution X was added to the reaction and the samples were centrifuged....". Similarly, my results were "Strain A showed greater activity towards substrate B, but Strain C showed greater activity towards substrate D". I never really thought about tense, I just wrote that way without thinking about it. But I my PhD is in science and you can get away with terrible writing in science!

Hello again,

I've just been told that it's grammatically correct to put everything in past tense BUT it's ok to write about more recent stuff in the present (i.e. stuff a few years old).

I'm assuming however that studies (i.e. where people do stuff with other people/experiments), should always be written in the past tense as these are 'facts'.