Check your own F and O
Your full written version, with every verb underlined and marked F or O. Go through and check each tense against its mark. Change nothing else.
Count how many disagree. That number is what today’s sixteen minutes has to fix.
Six things from your four minutes. Match each to what happens to it on the page.
A finished piece
Who I’m Becoming · 189 words
I have never been good at answering this question, which is probably part of the answer.
Five years ago I described myself by my job. I worked in a bank in Porto for nine years and I was good at it. If you asked me who I was, I gave you the name of the bank. I left in 2021 and it took about eighteen months to stop introducing myself that way.
What has changed is smaller than people expect. I have not discovered a passion. I have not moved abroad or learned an instrument. I have simply become someone who says no, which sounds like nothing and has cost me two friendships and gained me about six hours a week.
I have also become worse at some things. I have lost most of my patience for meetings that could be emails, and I have stopped pretending otherwise, which has not always gone well.
Looking at it written down, the honest version is this: I have not become a different person. I have become a more concentrated one, and I have not decided yet whether that is an improvement.
Four questions about the construction of the piece.
1. Paragraph two is almost entirely past simple. Why?
2. Paragraphs three, four and five are almost entirely present perfect. Why?
3. The piece says what the writer has not done three times. What does that buy?
4. The last sentence refuses to say whether the change is good. Why end there?
Five paragraphs, and where the tense turns
The shape
| Paragraph | Job | Tense | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One sentence. Admit something about the question itself | Perfect | 12–20 |
| 2 | Who you were. A closed period, with a date | Past simple | 50–60 |
| 3 | The main change, and three things it is not | Perfect | 45–55 |
| 4 | A change that is not an improvement | Perfect | 30–40 |
| 5 | The honest version, unresolved | Perfect | 30–40 |
Five sentences from a different piece, out of order. Put them into the five-paragraph shape.
- I have also become someone who checks flight prices at two in the morning, which is not a personality I ordered.
- I have been asked this three times this year and I have given three different answers.
- I have not become braver. I have become more aware of the distance, which is a different thing and I am still deciding how I feel about it.
- What has changed is that I have stopped assuming I will always be able to go back.
- Until 2020 I lived twenty minutes from the house I grew up in, and I never once thought about it.
Two rules the model obeys.
Exactly one paragraph is in the past simple, and it is the one about who you used to be. Everything after it is perfect, because everything after it is still true.
Every claim about change is followed by evidence or a cost. I have become someone who says no is an assertion; which has cost me two friendships is what makes it believable.
Before you write it
The tense turn, in one exercise. One to four words per gap.
Until 2019 I every summer with the same four people. We at seventeen and for eleven years nothing about it . Then two of them moved and one had a child, and we all four in the same room since August 2019. What is that I to expect it. I angry about it, exactly, and I anybody. I have just stopped assuming.
Six sentences of the kind that appear in first drafts. Fix each now.
1. I have left my job in 2021 and everything changed.
2. I work in the same place since I finished university.
3. I am much more patient since three years.
4. I never lived alone until this year.
5. What has changed is very very big and really important.
6. I have became someone who says no.
Write it
Task card · Writing · Individual · 16 minutes
The reflection that goes into your portfolio. It is about you, and the tense is the argument.
Five paragraphs, about 200 words, called Who I’m Becoming.
- Paragraph 1: one sentence, in the perfect, admitting something about the question.
- Paragraph 2: who you used to be. Past simple, with at least one real date and one for + closed period.
- Paragraph 3: the main change, in the perfect, plus two things it is not.
- Paragraph 4: something that has got worse, or harder. Perfect.
- Paragraph 5: the honest version, unresolved. Do not tidy it.
- Every claim about change gets evidence or a cost after it. Write the word count at the bottom.
Write straight through, then check the tenses. Twelve minutes writing, four minutes marking every verb F or O and fixing the disagreements. Doing both at once produces a careful, flat piece.
Task card · Audit · Pairs · 7 minutes
Swap. You are a reader who has never heard any of this out loud.
Hand back a marked page and one spoken sentence: the claim you found least believable, and what would have made it believable.
- Underline every verb. Mark F or O beside each from the time expression alone.
- Circle any tense that disagrees with its mark.
- Box any claim about change with no evidence or cost after it.
- Check the paragraph two boundary: is there exactly one past-simple paragraph, and is it the right one?
What the drafts did
Five sentences from drafts. Fix each, then check your own page.
1. Since 2020 I changed completely.
2. I have studied at that school for six years, from 2008 to 2014.
3. I am living in this city since I was born.
4. I have become more patient, more calm and more relaxed.
5. Nothing has changed for me last year.
What goes home
Two questions about your own draft.
1. Your reader circled four tenses that disagreed with their F/O mark. What does that tell you?
2. A claim about change with no evidence after it is —
Before next lesson. Rewrite it once from the marked page and bring the clean version on paper.
Next lesson you hand it in and then answer questions about your own life for six minutes, without it. Both go into the portfolio.