<li><p>Because traffic was unusually heavy, jim arrived ten minutes late for his job interview even though he had ran desperately all the way from the bus stop.</p></li>
<li><p>To insist that a poem means whatever one wants it to mean is often ignoring the intention and even the words of the poet.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So these Q’s are from the writing section. The ones where you choose which part of the sentence is wrong. I have the answer key to these Qs and they say the part i underlined is wrong, but i cant seem to figure out why they are wrong.</p>
<ul>
<li>Because traffic was unusually heavy, Jim arrived ten minutes late for his job interview even though he had run desperately all the way from the bus stop.</li>
</ul>
<p>Explanation: You can’t say he had RAN. The proper way to use ran in that sentence would be to completely eliminate “had” altogether. </p>
<p>Second sentence should read:</p>
<p>To insist that a poem means whatever one wants it to mean is often to ignore the intention and even the words of the poet</p>
<p>Explanation: The error here is that the incorrect sentence lacks parallelism. Notice how the subject phrase starts with “to insist”, meaning that the predicate must also begin with an infinitive verb (In this case “to ignore”).</p>
<p>If you meant had ran, it is not proper because it is not in the correct tense. While intuitively it may sound right to your ear, it does not abide by English grammar rules.</p>
<p>runs, run, ran:</p>
<p>he runs everyday (simple present)</p>
<p>he ran to the stadium (simple past) </p>
<p>he had run the entire distance (past perfect)</p>
<p>If it helps, memorizing some tricky verb tenses will help your writing score a lot. </p>
<p>This is basically all I used to work on writing and it works amazingly</p>
<p>^ While you can say that, I don’t think it would be appropriate for the tense in the sentence. The sentence is in the past tense, and had been running I don’t think is really used in English. I think usually when you use a verb ending in -ing it has to do with an event that is happening right now in the present and is ongoing. I don’t think “had” is usually used with -ing verbs. More common would be something along the lines of “He has been running for a while now.”</p>
<p>Had been running isn’t the right tense in the example sentence. ‘Had’ and ‘ing’ words can be used to describe what someone was doing when something else happened, but usually we would use ‘was’. EX. He had been running along the beach, when he fell and broke his ankle. He was running along the beach, when he fell and broke his ankle. Both are correct. The second is more common.</p>
<p>I thought “had been running” would be correct because in writing questions we have to assume that anything not underlined is completely correct and there is no other way of making the sentence sound correct without taking the “had” out.
By the way, I do not agree with “had been running” being less common. Both past simple and past perfect tenses have their own specific uses which should not be mixed. By using “had been running” or the past perfect tense in the sentence, sense of continuation of an action which had ended in the past is conveyed.</p>
<p>I think for the first one “been running desperately” actually makes more sense than “run desperately” because it is a continuous action.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you sure that’s right? I’m not sure if parallelism applies because the two verbs are in completely different parts of the sentence. To me it seems like it should be “ignorant of.”</p>
<p>No, “had run” is correct, I think. The action’s been completed, and the emphasis isn’t on the duration/continuous nature, it’s on the fact that he ran. If he’d been running and then suddenly been hit by a car, that would be a different story.</p>
<p>These two questions are from qas from 2006 or 2007.I can assure you,IT SHOULD BE ‘‘had been running’’ just because RUNNING is a continuous action…</p>