Avoiding shifts in tense when integrating quotations

Because it is conventional to write about literature in the present tense and because literary works often use other tenses, you need to exercise some care when weaving quotations into your own text. A first-draft attempt may result in an awkward shift, as it did for one student who was writing about Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Friday’s Footprint.”

TENSE SHIFT

When Rita sees Johnny’s relaxed attitude, “she blushed, like a wave of illness” (159).

To avoid the distracting shift from present to past tense, the writer had two choices:

  1. to paraphrase the reference to Rita’s blushing and reduce the length of the quotation

  2. to change the verb in the quotation to the present tense, using brackets to indicate the change.

REVISED

When Rita sees Johnny’s relaxed attitude, she is overcome with embarrassment, “like a wave of illness” (159).

REVISED

When Rita sees Johnny’s relaxed attitude, “she blushe[s], like a wave of illness” (159).

Using brackets around just one letter of a word can seem pedantic, so the writer chose the first revision.

Related topics:

Using brackets and the ellipsis mark to indicate changes in a quotation

Referring to literary authors, titles, and characters

Using the present tense to describe fictional events

Avoiding confusion of the work’s author with a narrator, speaker, or character