Using Tenses

The most common rule is to use present tense when dealing with literature or when dealing with ideas other people have said. That's a standard English Department rule--We read Hamlet in the present and he does things as we read; if we're talking about Shakespeare, we could use past tense if we're talking about what he did--"Shakespeare wrote a long play about a dead Dane" (rather than "Shakespeare writes a long play about a dead Dane" (unless you're using some kind of "historical present" where we're looking over Shakespeare's shoulders as he puts down those immortal words.) (Except in the case where we want to write "In this play, Shakespeare writes some good stuff"--where we are back in the present and reading as Shakespeare writes.

Some people (historians, for instance), don't mind moving all the talk about books and ideas into the past tense.

The advice to "be consistent with your tenses" is misleading. We constantly switch back and forth between tenses--and being "consistent" really means making sure your readers can figure out where you are in time. Check out the tenses in this piece of John Steinbeck:

At anchor, with the motor stopped, it is not easy to sleep, and every little sound starts one awake. The crew is restless and a little nervous. If a dog barks on shore or a cow bellows, we are reassured. But in many places of anchorage there were utterly no sounds associated with man. The crew read books they have not known about--Tony reads Studs Lonigan and says he does not like to see such words in print. And we are reminded that we once did not like to hear them spoken because we were not used to them. [The Log from the Sea of Cortez]

The problem with research is even messier. If the research is old and out of date, then it doesn't make much sense to say "Smith and Blarch (1922) say that dogs burp sixty times a week"--especially if we have new data that doesn't confirm those findings. (But then English professors have no problem with keeping the present tense even when the research or findings are very old.) Check out the tenses in the following paragraph from a piece of scholarly research in anthropology:

For Weber (1978[1947]), the community or society was the locus of expanding bureaucratic power in place of decreasing individual autonomy. But for Weber (1978[1947]:40), "community" itself refers simply to "a subjective feeling of the parties whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together," which Brow (1990:1) argues combines both a feeling of solidarity and an understanding of shared identity. [Leo Chavez, "The Power of the Imagined Community: The Settlement of Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States," American Anthropologist 96:1, March 1994.]

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