I have two sentences, using "schedule" and "reschedule" but I don't know which tense to use in each case.
The festival is scheduled to take place next Sunday.
Is is scheduled correct, or should it be the festival has been scheduled to / the festival was scheduled to / the festival will be scheduled to…
Today's lesson is rescheduled to next Monday.
Today's lesson has been rescheduled to / Today's lesson was rescheduled to / Today's lesson will be rescheduled to
In both cases, all the tenses seem to work for me, but maybe it shouldn't be. Could you tell me which to use?
Best Answer
"The activity is scheduled to take place" is correct. Breaking the sentence down, we get:
The activity is given a slot in the order of events. When looking at the agenda for the day, the activity will appear there.
Note that this part of the sentence can stand on its own. Not knowing when the activity will happen does not mean it can't happen.
Things or people are added to the schedule, and the things or people do things.
However, one does not schedule to a location or time. Otherwise the sentence could be ambiguous:
Wait. . . does that mean they were performing on a particular day of the week, or that they were performing a particular show or routine called Thursday?
The schedule itself isn't moving in space or time. (Except possibly in Harry Potter fanfiction, but that's a different matter.) Instead:
Note that in both these sentences, the rescheduling is not implied to be taking an action itself.
That all being said, in colloquial English you can probably get away with "activity was scheduled to. . ." I dislike the formulation, but given enough context people will understand you. But a 100% (well, 95% +/-) way to avoid any ambiguity is to form a sentence like this: