Free Verb Tense Checker

Tense conventions are one of the few pieces of academic style that are nearly universal across disciplines, and reviewers absorb them so thoroughly that violations register as wrongness before the reviewer can even name the rule. A methods section in the present tense reads like a protocol, not a report. A discussion that stays in the past tense never quite makes its claim. The rules themselves are simple; the difficulty is that drafts are assembled from materials written in other tenses, protocols, proposals, notes, and the seams show.

That is why this checker asks one question first: where is this text from? Given the section, it applies the convention exactly and shows its work, quoting each verb phrase it changed and the rule that motivated the change. Given no section, it enforces only internal consistency, because imposing a convention on general prose would be inventing a rule. Either way it changes verb forms and nothing else, which keeps the review of its fixes down to seconds.

Tense is one mechanical dimension among several, and the neighbouring tools each own one: the grammar checker for the full error sweep, the article checker for a, an and the, and the punctuation checker for the marks. For writers working in English as an additional language, tense and articles together account for most of the corrections a professional editor would make, and both tools here explain their fixes rather than just applying them.

When the whole manuscript needs the pass, not 250 words of it, the ProofreaderPro editor proofreads complete papers with tense conventions applied per section and every change tracked for your approval.