Verb tense

Many people find it difficult to know which tense to use in their manuscripts. Although the standard rule is that you should write in the past tense, in practice things are not that simple.

In English, the tense changes depending on what you are writing about.

When you report what you found or what you did, or what happened in your study, you always use the past tense.

We visited 3,500 households ...

Our study demonstrated that ...

There was no association between ...