If someone wrote something wrong and I want to tell him that all of what he wrote is wrong can I say: "You haven't even written any thing right" or should I use the past simple?
Learn English – “You haven’t written any thing right” or “You didn’t write…”
colloquial-languagepast-vs-present-perfecttense
Related Solutions
You cannot use I haven't known that here. The present perfect describes a present state which arises out of a prior eventuality, and you are implicitly saying that your present state is that you do know that—which is not a state that can arise out of your previous ignorance. (It can emerge from your previous ignorance, but it can only arise out of learning it.)
You may use I didn't know that, with or without until you mentioned it. This states that in the past you were in a state of ignorance, a state which ended at the point when your addressee mentioned 'it'. Until marks the end of a state, as explained here.
You are not obliged to include anything like until you mentioned it in order to make it clear that now you do know that—the discourse situation takes care of that—it serves only to make clear that it was your addressee's statement which dispelled your ignorance, not some other past event.
You may also use I hadn't known that, again with or without until you mentioned it. The past perfect does not necessarily describe a state arising out of a prior eventuality, because the past tense-domain does not have the contrast between simple past and present perfect which exists in the present domain—the past perfect serves for both. Here the past perfect acts as a “past-in-past”, analogous to the present-tense-domain simple past, so it describes a prior state of ignorance which ended at your past reference time, the time explicitly named in the until clause.
However, as you know, FumbleFingers' Perfect Truism instructs you that if you do not need a past perfect you should not use it. In this case there is no evident reason why a past perfect should be needed; consequently the best choice here is the simple past:
I didn't know that (until you mentioned it).
In my view, without more context, the following sentence has three possible interpretations
I thought you wrote poetry
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.”
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"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)"
Best Answer
The line above is a hyperbolic statement written in the Present Perfect, it suggests that when the person began writing, e.g. a message, an assignment, an email etc. up to the moment they paused, they have continually made writing mistakes. It may even suggest that the person has just finished, and the speaker is scrutinizing the piece of writing at that precise moment.
Imagine a person who started writing at 09.00 in the morning and ‘now’ it's 10.30, the person may still be writing or have just finished, but every line in the text contains an error of some sort. A friend who checks their writing for spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes (proofreading), might say
Note, the Present Simple tense is used here because we are stating a fact.
The first sentence, which was written in PP, can also be rewritten as
This construction is more common in American English, it doesn't matter if the time is mentioned or not, nor when the writing was completed. For many speakers of AmEng, the event is understood to have occurred at a specified point in time.
However, if the errors are related to typography blunders for instance, writing Queen Elizabeth I instead of Queen Elizabeth II, or writing dosen't instead of doesn't, you would call that a typo. Typos include spelling and punctuation inaccuracies that typically occur when someone types fast on a keyboard.
If the information given is incorrect for instance, someone writes that Queen Elizabeth I married Sir Francis Drake, you would say that statement was "completely wrong". In fact, she never married.