censure, said the tenser

January 11, 2008 11:07 AM

A) "At the next stage in the process, the tea leaves ARE blended". B) "At the next stage in the process, the tea leaves WERE blended". Is A correct from a formal grammar standpoint? If so, which tense is it using, and how is it using the past tense of "blend"? If not, why not?
posted by Jon Mitchell to writing & language (19 comments total)

I don't unserstand the question. Isn't it just the present tense?
posted by ManInSuit at 11:10 AM on January 11, 2008

Both are correct. The former is present tense, the latter is past tense, and both use the passive voice.
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:12 AM on January 11, 2008

I was taught that procedures should be written in past tense. Blended is the past tense of blend.
posted by JJ86 at 11:12 AM on January 11, 2008

It's present tense, passive voice. (The second is past tense, passive voice.)
posted by occhiblu at 11:12 AM on January 11, 2008

Seems to me that you can use either, depending what suits your purposes.
If it's for marketing materials, that's one thing -- I would use present tense. If it's for formal scientific writing, that's another -- I would use past tense.

The marketing materials are talking about a generality that happens again and again -- whenever we make the tea, we follow this procedure. That would be present tense. "Skilled craftsmen choose only the finest tea leaves. They blend them with aromatic oils..." or whatever.

If you put it in past tense, it sounds like something that only happened once, in the past -- "we divided the mouse population into three groups and administered treatments to the first two groups...".
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:18 AM on January 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

Metroid's got it.
posted by klangklangston at 11:18 AM on January 11, 2008

Another rule regarding tense that I was taught was that it should be consistent; the correct tense would be whatever the rest of the document is was written in.
posted by TedW at 11:37 AM on January 11, 2008

Thanks - I understand the tenses, but I don't fully understand why using "are" is correct with the past tense "blended". My intuition tells me (correctly, apparently) that both are acceptable, but I'm not entirely sure why...
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:38 AM on January 11, 2008

Isn't the "blended" in the example actually something other than the past tense? Past participle or something like that? (Grammar help in aisle six!)

English is funny in that it looks the same when you say "I blended the soup" and "After drinking six martinis, my head felt blended," but I'm pretty sure that those are different conjugations of the verb "to blend."
posted by Forktine at 11:41 AM on January 11, 2008

I don't fully understand why using "are" is correct with the past tense "blended". My intuition tells me (correctly, apparently) that both are acceptable, but I'm not entirely sure why...

Because it's passive voice. Someone (or something) else is doing the blending, so "blended" becomes basically an adjective describing what was done to the tea. If you flipped the sentences into active voice, you'd not use the past participle of "blend":

"At the next stage in the process, we blend the tea leaves."

"At the next stage in the process, we blended the tea leaves."
posted by occhiblu at 11:50 AM on January 11, 2008

In other words, in your original sentences, "to be" is the only thing functioning as a real verb in the sentence.
posted by occhiblu at 11:52 AM on January 11, 2008

A nice chart of various verb tenses, all in passive voice. Maybe those examples and explanations will help?
posted by occhiblu at 12:01 PM on January 11, 2008

More info on passive voice.
posted by occhiblu at 12:05 PM on January 11, 2008

Jon Mitchell writes "Thanks - I understand the tenses, but I don't fully understand why using 'are' is correct with the past tense 'blended'. My intuition tells me (correctly, apparently) that both are acceptable, but I'm not entirely sure why..."

It's the passive voice.

occhiblu writes "In other words, in your original sentences, 'to be' is the only thing functioning as a real verb in the sentence."

This isn't quite right. The verb is the passive voice of the verb to blend in simple past and present tenses. Past: I was blended, you were blended, he/she/it was blended, they were blended. Present: I am blended, you are blended, he/she/it is blended, they are blended. In these cases, the form of the verb to be is acting more as an auxiliary verb.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:05 PM on January 11, 2008

And as to why this isn't a purely academic point:

If the only verb in those sentences is to be, then the meaning is potentially different than if the verb is the passive voice of to blend. There's an example of the potential ambiguity in the Wikipedia article I linked to above:

"At noon, the window was closed."

If the verb in this sentence is the passive voice of to close, the sentence means that at noon, someone took the action of closing the window. On the other hand, if the only verb is to be, this sentence is just telling us that the state of the window at noon was closed.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:12 PM on January 11, 2008 [2 favorites]

That clears it up, thanks!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:24 PM on January 11, 2008

And as to why this isn't a purely academic point...

Yeah, I was being a bit overly glib in the name of clarity, but it probably confused the issue.
posted by occhiblu at 12:29 PM on January 11, 2008

The term "blended " here is not in the past tense. It's the past participle from the of the verb.
posted by bluefrog at 12:54 PM on January 11, 2008

Borrowing from bluefrog's link, the question becomes a lot more clear when you use a verb that has different past and past participle conjugations (eg "to eat": ate/eaten).

So, "the tea leaves are eaten" is different than "the tea leaves were eaten," and in neither case would you say "the tea leaves are/were ate." 'Tea leaves are eaten' implies an ongoing state of tea leaf eating; 'tea leaves were eaten' suggests that at a particular point in time, there was a consumption of tea leaves, whether or not such a thing happened more than once or might continue into the present.

This is a distinction that creates a lot of problems for native English speakers learning other languages (like most of the romance languages) that keep those conjugations more separate. In English, we use the participle all the time, but without being aware of it (as suggested by a number of the answers in this thread).
posted by Forktine at 3:20 PM on January 11, 2008