Last week I went over the differences between lie and lay with my students. As I warned them, it’s probably the hardest grammar rule out there. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

There are two basic steps:

1) Decide what meaning you want.

• “Lie” means “to rest or recline.”*
• “Lay” means “to put something down.”

2) Decide which form of the verb you need.

• present tense
• present participle (the -ing version)
• past tense
• past participle (used with helping verbs like have, has, and had)

The tricky part is that lie and lay are both irregular verbs, meaning that they don’t take the usually -ed ending for the past and the past participle.

Let’s look at lie (meaning “to rest or recline”) first.

• Present tense examples: Jenny lies in bed whenever she is sick. The pencils lie on the table over there.
• Present participle example: The papers are lying all over the floor.
• Past tense example: Jim lay in bed yesterday because he had the flu. (Not: Jim laid in bed.)
• Past participle example: The twins have lain in bed all week with the chicken pox. (Not: The twins have laid in bed all week.)

Now let’s look at lay (meaning “to put something down”).

• Present tense example: Lay your books on the desk, please.
• Present participle example: He is laying tile at his mother’s house.
• Past tense example: I laid the baby in the crib.
• Past perfect example: She has laid the old newspapers in a bin.

Notice the forms of lay always have an object (animate or inanimate) after them (books, tile, baby, newspapers). There has to be a “something” that is being set down.

On the other hand, if there’s no object and no actually movement, you want a form of lie.

*Lie can also mean “to tell an untruth.” However, we never seem to mess up that verb because it takes the regular -ed ending for past tense. (He lied. She has lied, too.)

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Did you know some verb tenses are “perfect”?

Everyone knows about the three “simple” tenses: present, past, and future. However, we also have three “perfect tenses” in English: present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.

So what makes a tense “perfect”? The perfect tenses have a version of “have” as a helping verb and use the past participle form of the verb, which is usually an -ed ending.

Why as writers should be care about the perfect tenses? They allow us greater accuracy in explaining exactly when the action of the sentence is happening.

Present Perfect Tense:

We use present perfect tense when something happened in the past but still occurs today. For example, I have made the pumpkin pie for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner for the past twenty years.

Notice the verb have made. I made the pumpkin pie in the past, and I’m still making it for this year’s Thanksgiving feast. In fact, I just took this year’s pie out of the oven an hour ago, and here it is:

Nice, huh?

We form present perfect tense by using the helping verb have (or has, if your subject is third person singular like he, she, or it) and the past participle of your verb. (e.g. I have helped Mom; he has helped Mom, too.)

Past Perfect Tenses:

We use past perfect tenses when something happened prior to something else in the sentence. For example, we had polished off the turkey by the time we started on the pie.

Noticed the verbs had polished and started. The verb started is in regular past tense. Had started is past perfect because it indicates that the action of polishing off the turkey happened prior to starting on the pie.

We form the past perfect by using the helping verb had with past participle.

Future Perfect Tenses:

We used the future perfect tense when we want to indicate that some action will have finished by the time we get to the next one. For example, I will have stuffed the turkey by noon tomorrow.

Notice the verb will have stuffed. It’s telling us that the action of stuffing the turkey will be finished by noon tomorrow. Noon has not arrived yet. In fact, tomorrow has not arrived yet! But by the time it does, the action of stuffing the turkey will already be complete.

We form the future perfect tenses by using the helping verbs will and have before the past participle.

turkey photo credit: Calgary Reviews via photopin

Questions about verb tenses? Got your own Thanksgiving example to share?

Compliments on my pumpkin pie? I’m an expert, you know. 🙂

We all know about the three main verb tenses: present, past, and future. Some of us even know about the three “perfect tenses”: present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect. However, I’ve seen a lot of talk online about progressive forms of verbs lately. These are  verbs that use a form of “to be” as a helping verb and then tack -ing onto the main verb.

Here are the six progressive forms of verbs:

• Present Progressive, such as “I am writing a new blog post.”
• Past Progressive, such as “I was grading papers when the phone rang.”
• Future Progressive, such as “I will be collecting those later.”
• Present Perfect Progressive, such as “I have been studying writing for many years.”
• Past Perfect Progressive, such as “I had been working on a story when a new idea occurred to me.”
• Future Perfect Progressive, such as “I will have been typing this essay for two hours by the time you get home.”

In an effort to be helpful, some writers mistakenly tell others to avoid -ing verbs. While I just spent a good hour or two deleting some unnecessary -ing verbs from my students’ essays, sometimes we really need them.

How do you know when to keep the -ing verbs and when to skip them? Think of the word “progessive.” Notice how it has the word “progress” in it. Use progressive forms when you are talking about something that is in progress. For example, “Currently, they are tallying the votes.”

Do not use progressive forms when the action isn’t “in progress.” Don’t say, “When you put the cake in the oven, it is rising in the oven.” (Believe it or not, I’ve seen sentences like this.) Instead, use the sentence: “After you put the cake in the oven, it should rise.”

One of my linguistics professors bemoaned the McDonald’s slogan, “I’m lovin’ it.” Why do they use the progressive form am loving? There’s no need. You’re not in the middle of the process of loving them. You simply love McDonald’s, so just say, “I love it!”

To make matters more confusing, not all -ing words are even verbs. Some are participles and others are gerunds, but I’ll save that for another post. 🙂

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As requested by my good friend and fellow blogger Ginny Marie, today I’m discussing the difference between “who” and “whom.”

First, the easy answer . . .

Use who in place of he. Use whom in place of him.

Now the full answer . . .

Who is a subject pronoun. That means you can use it as the subject of the sentence, such as “Who can answer my question?” (Remember to think of this as “He can answer my question.”)

Whom is an object pronoun. This means you can use it as a direct object or an object of a preposition.

For example: “Whom should I call?“ (Think: “I should call him.”) Whom is the direct object of the verb call.

Another example: “To whom should I address this letter?” (Think: “I should address this letter to him.”)  In this sentence, whom is the object of the preposition to.

Questions? Any other grammar dilemmas causing you to scratch your head? Leave me a comment.

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