I wasn’t intending on doing a series on various grammar points, but… People have been bringing up common misunderstandings in the comments, so I’m still here, appreciating all the post ideas. *grin*

Last time, we talked about the past perfect verb tense and how it helps us indicate to readers that a story event happened before the past tense of our novel. In the comments of that post, Kassandra Lamb (a frequent guest poster here) brought up another verb tense that often causes issues:

“Perhaps in some future post, you could clarify more about the past continuous tense. It’s one of my pet peeves that editors and other authors too often assume that “I was eating” is passive voice. No, it indicates an ongoing activity.”

Yay for another great idea for a post! *smile* Especially as I’ve haven’t talked much about passive voice here. Let’s talk about what passive voice is and how to tell when the word was is not a sign of passive voice.