ShmoopTube

00:03

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by verb tenses.

00:07

Maybe they just need a Swedish massage.

00:11

How should you change the underlined portion below, if at all?

00:14

I woke up at 10:30 to find that my alarm has failed to go off.?

00:20

Here are the potential answers...

00:25

This speaker is a hot mess.

00:27

Not only is she using the oldest excuse in the book for being late, she is also mixing verb tenses.

00:32

The sentence starts out with the verb “woke,” which is in the simple past tense.

00:37

This means that the other verbs in the sentence need to indicate that things happened in the past as well.

00:42

However, “has failed” uses the auxiliary verb “has,” which places “has failed”

00:49

in the present perfect tense.

00:51

This is a little confusing because verbs in the present perfect tense do designate action

00:55

that began in the past.

00:56

But...and this is a big but...the action (or the effect of it) has to continue into the present.

01:03

It’s called present perfect tense, so it has to have something to do with “now,” right?

01:07

Since this slacker’s alarm isn’t currently going off, “has failed” is incorrect,

01:12

and we can cross off choice (A).

01:14

Choice (C) is even further off the mark than the original sentence. “Is failing” is

01:17

in what’s called the “present progressive tense.”

01:20

This is when a verb indicates action that’s happening right now and that may continue into the future.

01:25

An example might be, “Because he overslept, he is running like crazy to get to work on time.”

01:29

The present progressive tense is, of course, wrong in this sentence, however, because the

01:33

past tense verb “woke” insists that the rest of the action in the sentence has to do with past.

01:38

We’ve got another clunker on our hands with choice (D). “Having failed” is what’s

01:42

known as a present perfect participle, and it isn’t called for in this sentence.

01:47

A present perfect participle is used to describe an action that came before something that’s

01:51

going on in the present.

01:52

Here’s an example: “Having run all the way to work, he’s now dripping sweat.”

01:56

Here, the present perfect participle does its job by clearly indicating that the marathon

02:00

run to work caused the profuse sweating that this guy’s co-workers are now blessed to witness.

02:06

In our original sentence, “woke” is in the past tense, so it and the present perfect

02:11

participle “having failed” don’t get along.

02:14

At long last, we’ve found the right answer with choice (B). “Had failed” is in the

02:18

past perfect tense, which is used to describe an action that occurred before another event

02:23

in the past.

02:24

So our speaker woke up in the past…to find that the alarm had failed to go off when it

02:28

was supposed to earlier in the morning. Makes sense right?

02:32

Next time our speaker should come up with a more creative excuse for being late.

02:35

What, there couldn’t have been a unicorn stampede?

Full Transcript