RISKVUE ARCHIVE | WRITING TIPS

Are Irregular Verbs Making You Tense?

Regular verbs form their simple past tense by adding -d or -ed.

I ordered dinner.
The waiter suggested dessert.
Surprisingly, I liked the olive oil cake.

Irregular verbs, however, require a bigger change than adding a letter or two to form their simple past and past participle tenses. Some of them are easy to remember: sink, sank, sunk; ring, rang, rung. Others can just plain stress you out: Hung or hanged? Lay, lain, laid, or lied?

Well, relax. You don't have to maintain a exhaustive database in your head. Instead, just remember these two stress-free helpers for using irregular verbs:

(1) Refer to a list of irregular verbs and their past tenses, like the partial one below. (There are many more irregular verbs than are shown here.) Or make your own a chart of the ones that regularly give you trouble.

(2) Bookmark the Web site "English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology" (http://www.scientificpsychic.com/verbs1.html), where you can submit a verb and immediately see a list of its various forms.

- - - - -

Need a general refresher course on the past tense?

The simple past describes actions that began and ended in the past.

His proposal sank to the bottom of the evaluation pile.

The past participle, when combined with an auxiliary verb (such as had), describes actions that happened in the past prior to another action.

By the end of the week, his proposal had sunk to the bottom of the evaluation pile.

riskVue | The webzine for risk management professionals
September 2007

Do you have a Writing Tip to share with riskVue readers? Send it to us at editor@riskVue.com.