Verb tenses in dissertations

Dr Cheryl Lange

Tense about tenses?

• There are no hard and fast rules about which tense to use when

but

• the following guidelines will help you decide what tense to use when.

Guidelines for verb tense use

• As writers, we make choices about which tense to use.

• Our decisions are based on a range of reasons including:

• convention (accepted practice)

• context

• emotional attachment to an idea/concept

• rhetorical or strategic purposes

Present tense – common uses

Use to discuss/describe

• a fact or situation that is always true or continues to be true, e.g. genetic information is encoded in the sequence of nucleotides on DNA.

• An aspect of your dissertation, a table or a figure etc, e.g. Figure 6 shows the distribution of the disease among older women.

• the implications of your or others’ work, e.g. These results suggest that nutritional supplements contribute to substantial weight gain.

Present tense - cont

Use

• for generalisations, e.g. Research students usually feel downhearted at some stage of their candidature.

• to report the position of a theorist/ researcher with whose work you feel some proximity, either in time or allegiance, e.g. Ballard and Clanchy (1991) presented only a limited understanding of the ways in which learning strategies assist learning. In contrast, the work of Biggs (1996) demonstrates that memorisation serves the purpose of retaining ideas so that they can be considered and understood.

Past tense – common uses

Use when

• describing your methodology, e.g. We hypothesized that milk production would decrease slowly.

• reporting your results, e.g. In the final experiment the response was unexpected.

• describing something that is no longer considered valid, e.g. Twentieth century demographers believed that the world’s population would stabilize by 2020 but current research shows it will not do so until 2040.

Use to emphasize the specificity of a study

Present perfect – common uses

Use to

• indicate that research in the area is still continuing, or has immediate relevance today, e.g. Several researchers have studied the effect of binge drinking on the cognitive functioning of adolescents.

• generalise about past ongoing research, e.g. Software has been tested manually for most of the last four decades.

Adapted from http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/general/lit-reviews/3.2.xml

Referring to the work of previous researchers – changing tenses

• Smith (2008) reported that adult respondents in his study remembered 30 percent more than children.

• The study was completed in the past but this finding was specific to that study.

• Previous research showed that children confuse the source of their memories more often than adults (Lindsay et al 1991).

• The research was conducted in the past but the finding is an accepted fact.

Future tense

Use

• to state what will be done later (more likely to be used in drafts)

• to state intention, e.g. in a proposal.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5pBAh2Qrm-g/TbuzdNApyCI/AAAAAAAAABk/aKa2XNHgyOM/s1600/future2.gif

You can use tenses to indicate more than chronology.

Use the past tense – to report others' research

– to indicate that research is of secondary importance to your current work.

• Use the present perfect – to indicate that the research is of more direct and primary

importance.

• Use the present tense – to indicate your general position relative to reported

research.

Exercise

• Compare passage 1 and passage 2.

• What do you notice about the different meanings that are conveyed when different tenses are used?

Different sections, different tenses – guidelines not rules

Abstract

• Past when referring to what was done and what was found at each stage of the research.

• Present to comment on the significance of your research/findings.

Introduction

• Often present, e.g. Sixty-six percent of high school adolescents and middle school pre-adolescents experience social isolation from peers and report loneliness to be a significant problem (Culp, Clyman, & Culp, 1995) while 20% state that it is persistent and painful (Brennan, 1982; see Heinrich & Gullone, 2006 for a review) (Tan 2011).

Different sections, different tenses cont.

Literature review

• You can use the present, present perfect or past.

• Think carefully about your choice as it will have subtle influences on your meaning.

• Check out the UWA Research Repository for examples of Masters and PhD theses http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/repository

Different sections, different tenses cont.

Materials and Methods

• Past and usually passive, e.g. Forty bushes were selected because of their height. They were used to …

Results

• Past when focus is on the study, e.g. The species which visited the bushes was more diverse than…

• Present when you mention tables, figures, etc, e.g. Table 1 shows …

Different sections, different tenses cont.

Discussion

• Present and/or present perfect to explain significance of study and interpret results, e.g. These results indicate… This study has established the usefulness of ….

• Past to summarise, e.g. The species were evident in numerically significant numbers …

References

• Those interested in tenses might like to read the paper Chen, M. 2009, Tense of reporting in dissertation literature reviews, Journal of Cambridge Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 139-150. http://journal.acs-cam.org.uk/data/archive/2009/200902-article13.pdf

• The February 2010 issue of the online publication, Graduate Connections Newsletter [http://www.unl.edu/gradstudies/current/dev/newsletter/], pp 16-17, gives some tips on the use of present and past tenses in your writing.

More tense help?

• http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/general/lit-reviews/3.2.xml

• http://www.education.monash.edu.au/students/current/study-resources/referencingconventions.html

• http://www.une.edu.au/tlc/aso/students/factsheets/grammar-verb-tense.pdf

• http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/601/04/

• http://depts.washington.edu/engl/askbetty/tenses.php