Lets Hear A Little Respect for the Pluperfect

Lets Hear A Little Respect for the Pluperfect Lets Hear A Little Respect for the Pluperfect Lets Hear A Little Respect for the Pluperfect By Maeve Maddox Television writers have little respect for standard English grammar. I know that. I also know that American writers in general have little use for the pluperfect (past perfect) tense, preferring instead to use the simple past with adverbial modifiers. Nevertheless, I was astonished by an exchange between a judge and a lawyer on an episode of the The Good Wife: The lawyer is trying to impugn a witness who has testified that a young man arrested at the scene of a murder did not have time to construct a story to conceal his involvement. The lawyer points out that, according to the police report, the man did have time. The lawyer says that by the time the suspect had reached the police station, †¦he had had time to construct a story. When the lawyer requests that his client be released on bail, the judge fixes him with a disapproving frown and says, Request denied. If for no other reason than that you used the pluperfect tense. Apparently TV writers are at war with more than pronouns. The pluperfect, also called the past perfect, is a verb tense used to indicate that an action took place before some other past action. It is formed with the auxiliary verb had and a past participle: When I arrived, the dog had gone. The word pluperfect derives from the Latin phrase tempus praeteritum plus quam perfectum, meaning past tense more than perfect. The word perfect comes from Latin perfectus, meaning completed. An action in the pluperfect is over, done, finished. Heres an example of a novelists use of the pluperfect when writing a third person narrative in the past tense. Its from Death in Holy Orders by English writer P. D. James. The ash, with its heavy cladding of ivy, was unmissable, but as they turned into the road, which was little more than a lane, one glance showed clearly what had happened. A large bough of the tree had been torn from the trunk and now lay along the grass verge, looking in the growing light as bleached and smooth as a bone. From it sprouted dead branches like gnarled fingers. The main trunk showed the great wound where the branch had been torn away, and the road, now passable, was still strewn with the debris of the fall: curls of ivy, twigs and a scatter of green and yellow leaves. The earliest example of the term pluperfect in the OED is dated 1500. The latest illustration of the term, dated 1995, reflects the modern disdain for this tense: 1995 Church Times 17 Nov. 17/3 They each gave us a few paragraphs of Mills Boon prose which were rather hard going, being over-full of pluperfect verbs. NOTE: Mills Boon is a British romance publisher founded in 1908 and sold to Harlequin Enterprises in 1971. American writers, perhaps aiming for a breezy style, avoid the pluperfect as much as possible, but they do use it. The following extracts from Tunnel Vision show how Sara Paretsky deals with it. Sometimes she disguises it with contractions: Id had my office there for ten years, so long Id come to overlook its litany of ills. Sometimes she introduces the pluperfect with a had, then switches to simple past: The building had already been one-third empty when the Culpeppers handed out their notice at New Years. They tried first to bribe, then to force, the rest of us into leaving. And sometimes she stays with the pluperfect throughout a paragraph: In a seconds unthinking revulsion I had thrust the bat back behind the radiator. I wanted to protect Emily and I didnt want anyone to know the weapon was there. But I would have to tell the police. Staring sightlessly into the mist, I saw it had been foolish to think otherwise. And my first impulse, to make an anonymous call, was also foolish: my prints were on the bat. At least I hadnt been so stupid as to wipe them clean. Any writing device can become an obstacle to reading comfort, for example: sentences all the same length, numerous characters whose names all begin with the same sound, an unusual word used numerous times. And yes, over-use of the pluperfect. However, just because the use of the pluperfect in narrative writing has its pitfalls, dont fall for advice that tells you to avoid the clumsy pluperfect altogether. The pluperfect is a useful narrative tense. Its up to the writer to keep it from becoming clumsy. The next time you read over your work and feel yourself becoming bogged down in hads, you might question the way you are presenting your story. The fault may lie with an over-reliance on flashbacks. You may need to figure out some other way to lay in your back story. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Fiction Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Writing a Reference Letter (With Examples)15 Great Word GamesDozen: Singular or Plural?