Email Tenses: Introduction - Part 0

One of the challenges of using English in emails is getting the tense right.

Every time you write a verb, you need to think about which tense to use. A lot of the mistakes we see in our students’ writing are due to the wrong choice of tense, so it’s worth spending some time to understand the differences.

Our goal in this series of posts is to help you more easily choose the right tense for each situation you encounter. It really isn’t too hard; you just have to ask yourself a few simple questions to help you choose correctly.

But first, a quick bit of background knowledge:

How many tenses are there in English?

We usually define twelve tenses in English:

It’s worth spending some time to get to know their names. Here are a few examples to get you familiar with the names of the tenses we’ll be using:

• 👉 I try to eat breakfast every day. (present simple)
• 👉 I always ate breakfast when I was a child. Now, not so much.(past simple)
• 👉 I am eating my lunch right now. I'll be back in the office soon. (present continuous)
• 👉 Have you eaten your dinner yet? (present perfect)
• 👉 I'm starving. I haven't eaten anything all day. (present perfect)
• 👉 You've been eating all day. Stop eating and do some work. (present perfect continuous)
• 👉 I'll meet you in the cafeteria for lunch at 12 o'clock. (future simple)
  

Which tenses do I need to use?

The good news is that for writing an email update, you won’t need to use all the tenses. The tenses shaded in the table above will be enough for most situations.

We will break them down into three parts in the following posts:

Part 1: What have you done? (Talking about the past)

Part 2: What are you doing now? (Talking about the current situation)

Part 3: What will happen next? (Talking about the future)

Let's get started with part 1