ShmoopTube

00:03

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the great cookie-making disaster of 2014.

00:19

How would you correct the following underlined portion from the passage? Does it need correcting?

00:23

was making

00:24

And here are the potential answers...

00:38

Looks like it’s time once again to play “Name that Tense.”

00:41

Let’s get choice (B) out of our faces first of all. The verb “made” is in the simple

00:46

past tense, which signals that the baking had already ended by the time the car backfired.

00:51

(C) gives us the past perfect tense with “had made.” The past perfect indicates that something

00:56

happened before something else in the past, which is mostly the case here.

01:00

However, past perfect also implies that an action occurred in the distant past.

01:06

Because the writer says these things happened yesterday, we can eliminate choice (C).

01:10

Choice (D) offers “had been making,” which is in the past perfect continuous.

01:16

This tense signals that something happened before another event in the past and continued on

01:20

until that event interrupted it. This makes some sense here as well, but we can ultimately eliminate

01:25

(D) for the same reason we nixed (C). The helping verb “have” implies the distant

01:31

past, and this event occurred “yesterday.”

01:33

The correct answer is (A), which uses the past continuous tense with “was making.”

01:38

The past continuous signals an action that was occurring in the recent past, but was

01:42

then interrupted by something in the simple past. This is totally what we’re looking

01:46

for here, since the writer was in the middle of baking yesterday, when she heard the car backfire.

01:52

Will she ever bake again?

Full Transcript