Check every had
Your full written version. Go through every had clause and check that you wrote something beside it. Any that has no answer comes out.
Count how many you delete. That number is usually two or three, and it is normal.
Six things from your five minutes. Match each to what happens to it on the page.
A finished piece
The Machine · 243 words
I got to the gate in Munich at nine in the evening and it was already dark behind the glass. The plane had gone forty minutes earlier.
There was a woman at the transfer desk at the far end of the hall, and by the time I reached her I had been walking and queueing for about forty minutes. Four people were already in front of me. All four had been on my flight from Lisbon.
She looked up before I said anything. “You checked in at a machine, didn’t you.”
It was not a question. What I did not know until that moment was that the airline had rebooked half the Lisbon passengers onto a later connection that afternoon, while we were all still in the air. They had done it by hand, from a list, and the list came from the check-in desks. Nobody who had used a machine was on it.
So I had spent two hours in Lisbon assuming the delay was inconvenient rather than serious, and by the time I landed the decision that ruined my evening had already been taken by somebody in an office I never saw.
I slept on a bench with my coat over my knees and got to Milan the following afternoon, eighteen hours late and too tired to mind.
I have checked in at a desk every single time since. It takes eleven minutes longer and I have never once regretted it.
Four questions about the construction of the piece.
1. The piece opens at the closed gate rather than at the booking. What does that force?
2. Paragraph four contains four past perfects in six lines. Is that over-application?
3. Paragraph three is one sentence and one line of speech. Why so short?
4. The last paragraph switches to the present perfect. Why?
Seven paragraphs, three layers
The shape
| Paragraph | Job | Layer | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The discovery, with a scrap of background | Simple, then one perfect | 20–30 |
| 2 | Where you were and how long you had been there | Background + a duration | 45–55 |
| 3 | The turn, with the line somebody said | Simple + direct speech | 15–25 |
| 4 | What had already happened, and who decided it | Past perfect throughout | 55–70 |
| 5 | What that meant about your own afternoon | Past perfect, one long sentence | 35–45 |
| 6 | What happened next, in order | Past simple | 25–35 |
| 7 | What you do differently now | Present perfect | 20–30 |
Six sentences from a different narrative, out of order. Put them back into the shape.
- We found it at half past two, three hundred metres away, with a light still on.
- We had been travelling since six that morning and had eaten nothing since Porto.
- I have written the phone number of every hotel on my hand ever since, which my sister finds ridiculous.
- The address the driver took us to at one in the morning was a house, not a hotel.
- It turned out that the street had two number elevens and that the hotel had taken its sign down the previous winter.
- The woman who opened the door said, quite gently, "There is no hotel on this street."
Two rules the model obeys.
Every past perfect in the piece is earlier than the same anchor — the moment at the desk. A paragraph that reaches back should reach back from one point, not from four different ones.
The forward story is short. Paragraph six is thirty words and covers eighteen hours, because by then the interesting part has already happened.
Before you write it
The paragraph that does all the explaining. One to four words per gap.
What I did not know until that afternoon was that the company its Tuesday service in April. They everybody who by email, and I over the phone in February, so I on the list. Nobody me and nobody to.
Six sentences of the kind that appear in first drafts. Fix each now.
1. In 2022 I had gone to Poland for a wedding.
2. I had arrived and I had waited and I had asked and nobody had helped.
3. By that point I was standing there for two hours.
4. It was a very very long and really difficult night.
5. I had realised that the desk closed.
6. They offered no compensaTION and no accommoDAtion.
Write it
Task card · Writing · Individual · 16 minutes
Your five-minute travel story, cut to 240 words. This is the piece that goes into your portfolio.
Six or seven paragraphs, about 240 words.
- Open at the discovery, not at the beginning.
- One paragraph that reaches back from a single anchor, with at least three past perfects in it.
- One duration: by the time … I had been …
- One line of direct speech, in the person’s exact words.
- A final paragraph in the present perfect: what you do differently now.
- Every had survives the question. Write the word count at the bottom.
Write straight through, then audit the tense. Twelve minutes writing, four minutes asking earlier than what? of every had and deleting the ones with no answer.
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 a drawn timeline: every event on one line, in the order it happened.
- Draw the line first, before marking anything. Question-mark anything you cannot place.
- Beside every had, write what it is earlier than. Circle any with no answer.
- Check the reach-back paragraph: does everything in it share one anchor?
- Mark the stress on every word over three syllables and flag any that looks wrong.
What the drafts did
Five sentences from drafts. Fix each, then check your own page.
1. When I got there, the office closed for lunch two hours before.
2. Last April I had missed a train in Vienna.
3. By then I was travelling for eleven hours.
4. I had understood that they made a mistake.
5. There was no informaTION at the desk about the cancelLAtion.
What goes home
Two questions about your own draft.
1. Your reader circled two had clauses with no answer beside them. What does that mean?
2. Your reader put four question marks on the timeline. What is missing?
Before next lesson. Rewrite it once from the marked page and bring the clean version on paper.
Next lesson you hand it in and tell the same story for five minutes without it, to somebody who will draw the line as you speak.