Learn English – Which tense should I use when presenting a table of data

paragraphspast-vs-presentresearchtenses

I have a table and the description of the table as followed:

enter image description here

Table 7 presents the likelihood of OPT occurrences from the time
annotated sentences; V-RB refers to the sentences which contain
post-verbal adverbs and RB-V refers to the sentences which contain
pre-verbal adverbs. The OPT phenomenon manifested 68.18% of the time
when an already or yesterday adverb was present in the sentence in the
ICE-SIN.

Within the paragraphs, my tenses were inconsistent. When i present the table and how to read the table I used present tense. But when I wanted to described the phenomenon that was recorded in the data, I used the past tense.

Is the inconsistent tenses grammatical? Or should I use the past tense when I present the table and how to read the table?

Best Answer

When you are presenting the table, you are doing it now, i.e. in the present time. The clue is in the word PRESENTing. But the table itself contains data that has already been collected - in the past.

So you are correct in presenting the table in the present tense, but discussing the previously collected data in the past tense.

Related Topic