1

Which is better?

The protocol was signed last week after all punch list items were fixed up.

or

The protocol was signed last week after all punch list items had been fixed up.

Hellion
  • 59,365
daniela
  • 11
  • 1
    The question was answered after it was asked. – JeffSahol Feb 19 '15 at 16:36
  • 1
    They are both ok. The word "after" makes clear the order of events, so the "had been" version is arguably needlessly complex. – Jim Reynolds Feb 19 '15 at 17:08
  • 1
    Executive Summary: There is no "sequence of tenses" rule in English. Therefore you can use any tense in any clause, if that's the tense you intend to use. If you come upon a grammar book or website that talks about "sequence of tenses", you will know that it is incompetent and incorrect; don't trust anything from it. – John Lawler Feb 19 '15 at 17:36
  • @daniela, I added an actual question to your post, but I'm not at all sure if it's the question you mean to be asking. Please feel free to edit in additional information regarding what confuses you between the two. – Hellion Feb 19 '15 at 20:04
  • I agree with others that both the examples are completely acceptable. English certainly does have a sequence of tenses rule, and English speakers will use it to interpret the second example sentence (else how could one make sense of it?). My friend Lawler ought to review McCawley's excellent treatment of the English tense system in The Syntactic Phenomena of English. – Greg Lee Feb 20 '15 at 00:19
  • 1
    I'm not sure why @JohnLawler claims there is no sequence of tenses in English. That's what I was taught. Nevertheless, while both sentences make sense, the first sounds very colloquial and informal. The second sound much better. – A.Ellett May 21 '15 at 03:32
  • I think of sequence-of-tenses as a "serving suggestion", like the Four-on-the-Floor Conditionals; not a rule per se, but a useful and normally safe strategy. There is a tendency to adapt tenses, but it's basically optional; not the kind of obligatory rule like subject-verb agreement or subject-auxiliary inversion. Of course, far too many English teachers and their students think that everything that is not compulsory is forbidden; options rarely enter the story. – John Lawler May 21 '15 at 15:39
  • There' a lot of reactionary comment going on to do with 'sequence of tenses' rules. Recall that the OP asked simply which option was 'better', not whether one was right and the other wrong. Of course both OP versions are OK but is one better than the other? OP version 1 sounds 'natural', 'current' and 'street'. It's also less precise and makes the sequence of events less clear than OP version 2. No big deal. But OP version 2 gets my vote for being 'better' (clearer). Treating both versions as equally valid is a bit like saying it's fine to use 'get' for 'most every verb you use. – Dan Jul 04 '15 at 00:46

1 Answers1

-1

The protocol was signed last week after all punch list items were fixed up.

This is not wrong. But it is not as clear as it could be.

Using the same, simple past tense - was and were - for both parts of this statement needlessly obfuscates the order of events (clearly indicated by the use of the word 'after'). The protocol could only be signed after all the punch list items had been fixed up.

Dan
  • 17,948