Learn English – “I thought you WRITE or WROTE poetry” – which is correct

backshiftingsequence-of-tensestense

Could you tell me if I want to inquire a person what he does and he answers that he writes fiction and I tell him "I thought you wrote poetry."
Or "I thought you WRITE poetry.", the action is in the present – the writing .

Best Answer

In my view, without more context, the following sentence has three possible interpretations

I thought you wrote poetry

  1. In the past the speaker knew, or they had been led to believe, that the listener wrote poetry. The speaker may be expressing their surprise (I was wrong!) or disbelief (where did I get this idea from?) that the listener is not a poet. The statement is equivalent to: “Someone told me you wrote poetry but I now realise that this is not true.”

  2. The speaker expresses their uncertainty as to whether the listener writes poetry now (this may also include the past but we have no way of knowing). The speaker is using the past simple to suggest uncertainty in the present. It is the hesitant equivalent to the statement
    I think you write poetry” = “I think you are a poet"

  3. The speaker discovers that the listener is indeed someone who writes poetry. By stressing the first verb (thought) the speaker is asserting that they had held this belief in the past but they were not certain, this contrasts with the “now”, their finding out the truth. In other words, their former belief has been confirmed. “I thought you wrote poetry (and I was right)"

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