What Is What Was

Understanding Tense Shift in English Narrative

When you're writing or editing something that moves between present and past, you run into a specific grammar problem. People mix up "what is" and "what was" all the time. The difference matters more than most writers realize. Here's the basic rule: "what is" refers to something currently true. "What was" refers to something true at a point in the past. That's it. The complication comes when you're telling a story and need to shift between the two, or when you're summarizing content that already exists. I spent three years doing developmental editing for a mid-size publisher. The most common mistake we saw wasn't comma splices or dangling modifiers. It was tense drift in first-person narratives. A writer would open in past tense, drift into present without warning, then snap back. Readers don't notice it consciously, but it creates this subtle unease. The book feels off, and nobody can pin down why.

The fix is usually a color-code pass. I'd highlight all first-person narration in yellow and all past-tense reference in blue. Anything that didn't match the established pattern jumped out immediately. Takes about twenty minutes for a 60,000-word manuscript. There's a more specific edge case that trips people up repeatedly. When you're discussing a work of fiction—like a book or a film—the convention is to use present tense for the events of the story itself. This is called the literary present. So you'd say "Hamlet hesitates," not "Hamlet hesitated." But if you're talking about the historical circumstances around the work's creation, that shifts back to past tense. "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600." Mixing those two conventions carelessly is where most people get it wrong. I once worked on a thesis where the author kept switching between literary present and narrative past in the same paragraph. The committee flagged it as confusing, and honestly, they were right. The reader has to constantly reorient themselves about whether something is happening now or happened then. It breaks the reading flow.

Practical Application

When you're translating content from one language to another, or adapting material for a new audience, you may encounter situations where the original text uses past tense but your version needs present tense, or vice versa. This isn't just a grammar exercise. It changes how the reader experiences the information. A news article written today about an event that happened last year should use past tense for the event itself and present tense only if you're referencing something still relevant. "The company announced layoffs yesterday" versus "The company says it is restructuring." These are both correct, but they serve different purposes. Another thing beginners miss: reported speech. When you report what someone said, you typically backshift the tense. "I am tired" becomes "She said she was tired." But if the situation is still true, you can keep the present. "She said she is tired" works if she's still tired. This is where casual writers and careful writers separate. The casual writer picks one rule and sticks to it. The careful writer reads the surrounding context and decides which makes more sense.

The real problem area is when you're writing about ongoing processes. Something that started in the past and continues now. "The system has been running for three years" versus "The system was running for three years." One implies it's still running. The other implies it stopped. Getting this wrong can change the entire meaning of what you're communicating. If you're working on a project where tense consistency matters—technical documentation, academic writing, fiction—do a focused pass just for present and past tense usage. Don't try to catch everything at once. Set the document aside for a few hours, then come back and read through only looking for tense shifts. You'll catch things your first pass missed every time. There's no universal tool that handles this perfectly. Grammar checkers will flag obvious errors but they miss the contextual judgments that matter. A word processor find function for "is" and "was" can help, but it'll give you false positives. You need a human eye for the nuanced cases.