<p>Does College Board not belive in literarly present tense? I have always thought that if you are talking about a book, you say something like this:</p>
<p>In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes....</p>
<p>While the SAT had sentences like:</p>
<p>In Oliver Twist, Dickens described...</p>
<p>Grammatically, you could use either (although the first has more of an impact) as long as you are consistent in your tense... I think.</p>
<p>You're right, eff. It's all in how you look at it. If you subscribe to the school of literary criticism that believes that books spring from their authors almost without effort, and are essentially self-contained universes in their own frame of reference, then you use the present tense because it conveys a sense of the eternal: Dickens didn't just describe something once in Oliver Twist--as long as OT exists (which will be forever, by this way of thinking), Dickens will be right there in those pages describing things.</p>
<p>Then there's the other view, which says essentially that books are produced through a lot of conscious effort and compromise between the artist's vision and the pressures of real life (deadlines, financial conerns, writer's block, ego, et cetera). If you subscribe to this view, then you emphasize the fact that Dickens only published his words once, and you use the past tense. The suggestion here is that if Dickens had it to do over, he might very well choose to describe the exact same thing with different words; the first view rejects that possibility and says that Dickens was really only a channel for OT, and that OT could never have gone any other way.</p>
<p>By the way, "The OT" would be a great name for a Fox remake of the novel. If there are any Fox execs reading this.</p>
<p>Also, I've heard the explanation as "the book plot occurs each time it is read". Thus, it must be referred to in the present tense, because the book's contents are continuous.</p>
<p>Yeah, I'd say in general the present tense is the accepted way to go when you talk about a literary work. But the College Board isn't <em>wrong</em> to use the past tense in describing the writer's individual actions, so don't let it throw you if you see it that way on a test.</p>