Shifts

Writing is a form of communication.

It's not just about what you say, it's how you say it.

You are communicating more than just your chosen topic.

• How you communicate your message says a lot about you as a writer, thinker, and student.
• Don't communicate that you don't really care about your topic through lack of proofreading!
• Don't let your reader become distracted from your message due to careless errors.

The problem with shifts:

Generally, readers expect you to be consistent and to keep control of:

• Verb tense (past, present, future, etc.)
• Voice (active or passive)
• Mood (explaining, preaching, or commanding)
• Person (I, you, they, we, etc.)
• Number (single or plural)
• Quotations (direct or indirect)
• General sentence construction

Students often excuse themselves from errors in these departments by saying, "Well, you could figure out what I mean." Yes, but we also figured out that you are immature and lazy and that you want the reader to do a lot of the work of unwinding the meaning of the sentence.

You don't want prospective employers and future teachers to assume you are immature and lazy in your writing.

Yet one more way that spoken English differs from written English

At the lunch table, you might say,

We were just driving down the road, minding our own business when a cement mixer runs a stop sign and smashes into our car. You really must be careful on those country roads! Nobody was hurt, but when we talked to the man at the cement mixer company, they didn’t seem to want to help.

That's great lunch table talk, but very sloppy for a formal essay (even though the spelling is all correct).

Avoiding the shifts

This web page from Towson State College is a great general tutorial on shifts.

Each numbered section begins with a link that looks like this. (It's black, but if you click it you get more information.)

1. verb tense

More information:

• Consistency of Tense and Pronoun Reference, a web page from Capital Community College Foundation.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 7/18/22 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.