Today's topic
The past-perfect verb tense: nope, not a typo.
Today's post was inspired by something that happened at one of my
recent presentations. Someone saw the phrase "had had" on one
of my PowerPoint slides and mistakenly assumed it was a typo--that I'd repeated
the word unintentionally. But it was not a typo. It was an example of the past
perfect, a frequently misunderstood and misused verb tense.
In my presentation, I was describing a 1994 study conducted by
several leading experts on critical thinking. These authors found that
many college professors had never received training on how to facilitate better
critical thinking skills in their students. As I pointed out on my slide,
one of their findings was that "few faculty had had in-depth
exposure to research on the topic of critical thinking."
Why did I say "had had" instead of "had?"
This is where the past perfect tense comes in.
As we all know, we use the plain old past tense when we simply
want to refer to something that happened in the past. For example:
- The burglars
escaped.
- We had that
computer for six years.
- Jen visited
Seattle in 2010.
- Jack never saw
the ocean.
- Natalie felt
conflicted about leaving Chicago.
- I liked the
movie.
The past perfect tense goes a step further. We use it when
we want to refer to something that happened in the past, before
another action that also happened in the past. We form the past
perfect when we combine the word "had" with another verb.
For example:
- By the time the
police arrived, the burglars had escaped.
- We had
had that computer for six years before it crashed.
- Jen had
visited Seattle once in 2010 before she moved there in 2014.
- At the time of
his death in 2004, Jack had never seen the
ocean.
- As you can see,
sometimes we have to interrupt the "had + verb" combination
with an adverb, like "always," "never,"
"previously," "just," etc. This is still past
perfect tense.
- Natalie felt
conflicted about leaving Chicago, as she had lived there
her whole life.
- I only liked the
movie because I had read the book.
As you can see in the examples above, we use the past perfect when
we want to refer to two events that occurred in the past, one of which
occurred before the other.
So let's get back to my PowerPoint slide, and the typo that wasn't
a typo. Why did I say "few faculty had had in-depth
exposure to research on the topic of critical thinking"? Because I
was referring to a study from 1994. The study occurred in the past,
and the professors' lack of exposure to critical thinking research occurred
prior to the study.
