The tense a piece of writing is framed in has a dense
effect on the message the piece of writing is conveying. Imagine writing the
history of Shaka Zulu of the Zulu Kingdom in the present tense, people who will
read your work will probably be thinking you are trivial. Unfortunately Burmese,
Dyirbal and Chinese languages have no tenses generally, so reading Shaka’s
history in Burmese, Dyirbal or Chinese is trivial. Although the speakers of Burmese,
Dyirbal or Chinese themselves have a way of indicating the time frame, the English
language unlike these languages expressly uses tenses to express the time
frame.
What is a tense
In grammar, tense is the state of being of a
verb or the time frame of a verb. That is a verb expressing what is happening
now or what happened then or what will happen.
The Main Types of Tenses
They are three main types of tense namely Present,
Past and Future tense. These tenses are further given more formation
about their time frame in simple, perfect, continuous or progressive, and
perfect continuous. The focus of this article is on the present simple, the
past simple, and the present perfect as they are the main type of tenses used
in academic writing.
The Present simple
It is the default tense in academic writing it is used
to describe facts, generalizations, and truths that are unchanging. for example,
“Dennis sleeps a lot during the day.”
“ This piece of text analyses the effect
of burning fossil fuels in the environment”
The Present Perfect
It is used in academic writing to describe previous
research or events that began in the past and to emphasize the relevance of the
previous research or events findings in the contemporary.
“Dennis has written lab reports for most
of his second-year courses, but he still has some lab reports left to write.”
“ it has been demonstrated that
technological advancements are not evenly distributed in the global village”
Past simple
It is used in academic writing to refer to historical events
or actions completed in the past.
“Dennis wrote the lab reports for all of
his second-year courses last month.”
“ Data obtained from the survey was used
to determine the likelihood of the events taking place”
The Functions of tenses in Academic
Writing
The tables below elaborate on the functions of the 3
commonly used tenses in Academic Writing according to The Writing Center
at George Mason University.
The Present Simple Tense
|
Functions |
Example |
|
1) To frame a paper. It is used in introductions to state what is
already known about the topic, and in conclusions to say what is now known. |
Scholars share a common argument that
engineering is the most male-dominated of all professions. The timing of college enrolment is associated with a
number of variables. |
|
2) To point out the focus, main argument, or aim of the current paper. |
This paper analyses the impact of high temperatures
on certain species. |
|
3) To make general statements, conclusions, and interpretations about
findings of current or previous research. It focuses on what is known now. |
Graduate school is regarded as crucial
for starting an engineering career because failure at this stage closes the
door to professional engineering careers, and later career trajectory
change is more difficult the longer it is delayed. |
|
4) To refer to findings from previous studies without mentioning the
author’s name. |
Children ingest roughly 50-200 mg soil/day [2,3]. |
|
5) To refer to tables or figures. |
Table 1 presents the structural units. |
|
6) To describe the events or plot of a literary work. This usage has
the name “Narrative present”. |
In Mansuji Ibuse’s Black Rain, a child reaches for pomegranate
in his mother’s garden, and a moment later he is dead,
killed by the blast of an atomic bomb. |
The Past Simple Tense
|
Functions |
Example |
|
1) To report specific findings of a previous study (usually with the
authors’ names in the sentence) to support a general statement. |
Probably the most commonly discussed phenomenon in music cognition is
the Mozart Effect (this is the general claim). (Specific example) Rauscher
and colleagues first documented this effect in their seminal
paper. |
|
2) To describe the methods or data from a completed experiment. |
Statistical analyses were used to determine
relationships between variables. |
|
3) To report the results of the current empirical study. |
The L1-English writers utilized mostly NP- and PP-based bundles (78.3% of types and 77.1% of tokens). |
|
3) After any past time, marker. |
After the war, Germany had to face strong reparations
from the allied nations. |
The Present Perfect Tense
|
Functions |
Examples |
|
1) To introduce a new topic. Could also be used to introduce a new
report or paper. |
There has been a large body of research regarding the
effect of carbon emissions on climate change. |
|
2) To summarize previous research with general subjects (such as
“researchers have found…”) Present perfect places emphasis on what has been done rather
than on what is known to be true (present simple). |
Some studies have found that girls have significantly
higher fears than boys after trauma (Pfefferbaum et al., 1999; Pine and
Cohen, 2002; Shaw, 2003). |
|
3) To point out a “gap” in existing research: to make a connection
between the past (what has been found) and the present (how will you add more
to the field). |
While these measures have proved to be reliable and
valid predictors of what they are measuring, there is little data on how they
relate to each other. |
|
4) To describe previous findings without referring directly to
the original paper. |
It has been shown that biodiversity is not evenly
distributed throughout the world. |
Adapted from:
Bryson, S (2014) Common Uses of Tenses in Academic
Writing. Scribbr. Available at: https://www.scribbr.com/language-rules/tenses/
(Accessed 01 Jul. 22)
Nordquist, R (2019) Understanding Verb Tenses. ThoughtCo.
Available at https://www.thoughtco.com/tense-grammar-1692532.
(Accessed 01 Jul. 22)
The Writing Center (no date) The Three Common Tenses
Used in Academic Writing. George Mason University. https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/27010/original/The_Three_Common_Tenses_Used_in_Academic_WritingATI.pdf?1565036748 (Accessed
01 Jul. 22)
Enago Academy (2018) How to Use Tenses in Academic
Writing Effectively. Available at: https://www.enago.com/academy/tense-usage-in-academic-writing/
(Accessed 01 Jul. 22)