TommyWallach wrote:
Hey All,
Tons of great discussion on this one, but nobody seems to have broken it down in a totally convincing way. So here I am!
99. Although the manager agreed to a more flexible work schedule, he said that it must be posted on the bulletin board so that both management and labor will know what everyone is assigned to do.
(A) he said that it must be posted on the bulletin board so that both management and labor will know what everyone is
ANSWER: This is a tough verb tense question. In the second clause we have a past tense verb and a future tense verb. This is not the most beautiful way to formulate this issue. Consider a smaller sentence: "Though I liked 'Inception', I told my friends that it must be seen so that everyone will discuss it with me." See how wrong that is? I "liked" it in the past, so why would I then go into the future for when people discuss it with me? Also, then we need YET ANOTHER tense, the present "is". That's three tenses in ONE CLAUSE. Ick! However, none of it is technically wrong. Still, is this an official question? I do not approve.
(B) he said it had to be posted on the bulletin board so that both management and labor knows what everyone is
PROBLEM: Though the "had" is actually okay here, it goes wrong soon after. First, we would want "know" to match with the plural subject "management and labor". Also, we would need "would know" after the past perfect.
(C) he said that they would have to post the assignments on the bulletin board so that management and labor knew what everyone was
PROBLEM: There is no antecedent for the pronoun "they". Again, we would want "would know" instead of "knew".
(D) he said that the schedule would have to be posted on the bulletin board so that both management and labor would know what everyone was
PROBLEM: We can't justify the "was" at the end, because this is a conditional phrase, which is in the future. However, I still hate A.
(E) saying that the schedule had to be posted on the bulletin board so that both management and labor would know what everyone had been
PROBLEM: No reason to use past perfects here.
Hope that helps, all! Remember the MOST IMPORTANT RULE for verb tense remains that you shouldn't change the tense if you don't have to. It's just these future/conditional situations that can get hairy.
-t
Would you agree that changing “must be” with “has to be” makes A more palatable?
According to some internet research, we “use ‘have to’ when somebody else other than the speaker has made the decision.”
The next step would be recognizing that the use of “to be” requires using “will”.
Lmk what you think!
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