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Munster records told me that they made a mistake in our orders .In fact they mixed up both addresses. They sent my record to you and your record to me so you have received mine and I 'm going to receive yours.

Would it be better to used "had mixed" instead of mixed to emphasize the confusion?

I really can't choose between these two solutions.

Yves Lefol
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  • I think you mean "mixed up", not mixed. Mixed means something like "combined". Mixed up means "confused". – stangdon May 05 '23 at 18:02
  • I think it would be better not to even think about using any Perfect verb forms (they may create confusion, but Perfect verb forms have nothing whatsoever to do with "emphasizing" confusion). If you really want to show off your language skills, just use the Perfect once on the first relevant verb (...told me that they had* made a mistake...)* and stick to Simple Past after that. But there's no real point to the Perfect here, since there's no need to clarify the obvious sequence of events. – FumbleFingers May 05 '23 at 18:10
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    Does this answer your question? Canonical Post #2: What is the perfect, and how should I use it? – FumbleFingers May 05 '23 at 18:11

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When we use the past simple tense, we are telling a story or listing events in the order they happened. It's like a timeline of what happened. On the other hand, when we use the past perfect tense, we want to emphasize that one event happened before another event, like in case when the second event happened because of the first event.

In the case of the example sentence, if we use the past simple tense and say "mixed up," it means we are telling a story of what happened in order. This is appropriate if we discovered the mistake after it happened.

If we use the past perfect tense and say "had mixed up," it means we want to emphasize that the mixing up of the orders happened before we discovered the mistake. This shows that it was a completed action that happened before another past event.

Both past simple and past perfect tenses are possible, and which one to use depends on what the speaker wants to emphasize. In this case, using "mixed up" is appropriate and clear, so there is no need to change it to "had mixed up" unless we want to emphasize the sequence of events differently.

GrammarErrorCom
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  • in this case the mixing up of addresses happened before the mistake , the mixing up led to the mistake but what happened first is the mixing up of addresses so I thought that past perfect could have been a better choice – Yves Lefol May 06 '23 at 16:26
  • Contrary to the impression created by many EST textbooks, the choice of tenses depends solely on what the speaker intends to communicate. – GrammarErrorCom May 07 '23 at 01:06