Editing Any tips on how to find wrong tenses?

[Kotohood]

The question as per title. Are there any tips to finding the wrong tenses during editing?

My way so far is to read through a chapter twice and rewriting any grammar and tense errors and to rewrite words to make it sound better. Then my friend told me to use the Ctrl +F/R Method.

He told me to find for verbs (is/are/has/have/etc) and to replace them with past tense(was/were/had/etc) and oh boy, the whole chapter is lit on fire. Chances are there are probably like hundred non-common verbs that I missed out during my initial reading.

So I would like to ask if any of you have any other tips to find for finding wrong tenses? I want to be one of those people who can naturally spot wrong tenses, but it seems like it will take me a while longer before I can evolve into that guy.

 

[Pistachio]

Hmm, my routine is actually the same as yours and the dilemma is the same as yours, lol. That aside, I noticed that it is hard to spot wrong tenses while doing the editing alone since your eyes had already interpreted the text as 'okay'. I think the ideal way to circumvent this adaptation is to edit as much as you can then do a final edit, say a few hours before a chapter is published, with days in between. In my case, I find this practice to be helpful although there are still some parts that I'll discover I've missed [my grammar skills ain't that polished], the flaws won't be that significant.

Another tip would be to employ the help of a friend or any third party who hadn't read the work yet, just so there'd be fresh eyes to look over what you'd written. Other than these, I don't have much to say so, hope they'll help.

 

[FacelessBoy]

When I tried writing I would turn "Grammarly" on. It's a Firefox extension that shows you synonyms and errors that you normally won't see.

Obs: As time passes correcting the sentences and checking the repetitions will become a habit

 

[Phantomheart]

Reading through your writing and speaking aloud will also help with tense issues and grammar mistakes, as when you hear something wrong, you'll know it is wrong.

 

[Ai-chan]

He told me to find for verbs (is/are/has/have/etc) and to replace them with past tense(was/were/had/etc) and oh boy, the whole chapter is lit on fire. Chances are there are probably like hundred non-common verbs that I missed out during my initial reading.

That's bad advice that published authors are starting to call bull. It can work if you want everything in past tense, but it's completely counterproductive and confusing for anything else. With your friend's advice, all the dialogues and proses will be in past tense.

In the first place, a story is not about past tense. It's all about what works for the story. You can tell the story in past tense or present tense. Tense changing is also normal even within the same paragraph. You just need to know your tenses and understand what the tenses are supposed to be for that particular scene.

A common shortcut is using something like Grammarly. But it doesn't really fix your grammar and if you don't know grammar in the first place, it's useless. What Ai-chan does is usually to read it 3 or 4 times, which is usually enough to catch the common errors. Or if you really have bad grammar, perhaps getting a proofreader is the only thing you can do.

 

[GDLiZy]

Go reread your past chapters and you will start to find faults that the past you neglected. The side effect is that you will hate your past-self a little bit more every time you spotted an easy and obvious mistake.