Help with a writing question- Urgent!

mandelbaum
Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:40:35 +0000

SENTENCE 1
The hearing of the principal’s speech precedes, in time, the announcement of the staff cuts. These two events are not occurring simultaneously.

If the writer narrates the later event in the simple past tense (“was not surprising”) or even the perfect tense (has not been surprising"), the earlier event must take the pluperfect (“had heard”). “Pluperfect” literally means “more than perfect”, indicating an action completed earlier in time than a later one also mentioned.

If the writer replaced “had heard” with just the simple past “heard”, (s)he would imply that the speech coincided with the news, altering the intended meaning of the sentence.

SENTENCE 2
Think about who is doing the act of “considering”.

A sentence that employs the passive voice should introduce the performers of the action in the verb with the preposition “by” (i.e. “by the family”) rather than “to”.