The language of life stages
Think about where you will be in five years. Not where you would like to be — where you will be, if nothing dramatic happens.
Hold it. First, the words people use about change over time.
Eight expressions about life stages. Match each to what it actually says.
Somebody projecting five years
This time in five years
In five years I will be forty-one, which is not a fact I have any feelings about yet.
If nothing changes, I will be doing roughly what I am doing now, in the same building, with a different job title. That is the projection I dislike, it is also the most likely one, and I notice that I have not done anything about it.
By then I will have been at the company for eleven years. Eleven years is long enough that leaving stops being a decision and becomes a story you have to tell at interviews.
My daughter will be twelve. She will have spent more of her life in this city than I had at her age, which was one of the things I wanted for her and is now one of the things I worry about.
I will probably still be renting. I will not have saved what I said I would save. I will, however, have paid off the loan, which I have been paying off since 2019 and which ends in March of that year — the only thing in this entire paragraph I can be certain of.
Five questions. The first two are about the content; the rest are about where the speaker is standing.
1. What does the writer dislike about the most likely projection?
2. Why does the loan get the last sentence?
3. I will be doing roughly what I am doing now. Where is the speaker standing?
4. By then I will have been at the company for eleven years. What does by then do?
5. The paragraph uses will be, will be doing and will have done. What differs?
Three futures, three positions
Where you are standing when you look
| Form | Where you stand | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| will + verb I will move next year. | Now | An event, ahead of you, as a whole |
| will be + -ing This time next year I will be living in Porto. | Inside that future moment | Something already in progress around you |
| will have + participle By June I will have moved. | At a future point | Something that is by then already over |
| will have been + -ing By June I will have been living here ten years. | At a future point | Something that has run up to it and may continue |
The instruction word. The perfect futures nearly always come with a phrase that puts you in the future first: by then, by June, by the time I am forty, this time next year. If the sentence has no such phrase, the vantage point has not been set and the tense will sound wrong however correctly it is built.
Set the position, then use the tense. In that order.
Six lines of a projection, out of order. Put them into the order that moves from now, outwards, and then back.
- This time next year I will be having exactly this conversation with myself again.
- If nothing changes, in five years I will still be renting it.
- Unless I do the one thing I have been avoiding since March, which is ask.
- At the moment I am renting a flat I do not much like, ten minutes from work.
- I will also have been in the same job for eleven years, which is the part that frightens me.
- By then I will have paid something like sixty thousand euros to somebody else’s mortgage.
Choosing the position
Eight sentences. Choose the form that matches where the speaker is standing.
1. This time next week I ___ on a train to Madrid.
2. By the end of the month I ___ the report. — it will be finished
3. I ___ her on Tuesday anyway, so I can ask then. — it is already arranged
4. In August I ___ here for exactly ten years.
5. Don’t call at eight — we ___.
6. Call at ten. We ___ by then.
7. I think it ___ tomorrow. — a prediction about rain
8. By the time she is thirty she ___ in four countries.
Six sentences. One error each.
1. By June I will finish the course. — looking back from June
2. This time next year I will live in another country. — inside that moment
3. By then I will have work here for ten years.
4. Don’t phone at seven, I will have dinner. — in the middle of it
5. By the time you arrive we will be finished the meeting.
6. I will be seeing him next Tuesday, so I will be asking him then. — the second is a decision made now
Five years
Task card · Speaking · Pairs · 3 minutes each, twice
Tell your partner where you will be in five years, if nothing dramatic happens. Not where you hope to be.
Three minutes. Then your partner gives you a set of numbers, and you do it again.
- Round one: say it however comes out. Do not think about tenses.
- Listener: tally four things — will, will be doing, will have done, and going to. Numbers only.
- Round two: same five years, but include at least one by then sentence and one this time in five years sentence.
- Listener: tally again, and say which version told you more.
What the tally usually shows. Round one is nearly all plain will, sometimes with a few going to. That is not a small stylistic matter: with one future form you can only describe events, never a position in time, so five years arrives as a list of things rather than as a place you will one day be standing.
What round two produced
Five sentences of the kind round two produces. Fix each.
1. By then I will living somewhere else.
2. This time in five years I will have thirty-nine.
3. By 2031 I will have finish my studies.
4. In five years my son will have twelve years old.
5. By then I will be worked here for a decade.
Two questions, not one
Three questions. Thirty seconds.
1. What is the second question every English tense answers?
2. What does by then do?
3. What can you not do with only will?
Next. Four people at four different points in a life, looking in both directions at once.