Prose checks › Tense and POV slips Free
Prose check: tense and point of viewThe paragraph that slipped into the wrong tense.
You wrote the whole book in past tense. Except that one paragraph in chapter twelve, which went present after a rewrite. Falcontext works out your book’s tense and point of view, and finds the paragraphs that don’t follow: tense shifts and POV slips.
What’s a tense shift or POV slip?
A tense slip is narration that changes tense by accident. A past-tense book where a few sentences go present. Usually after a rewrite, or a scene written on a different day.
A point-of-view slip is narration that changes person: “she” becoming “I”, or the other way round.
She looks down into the dark and sees nothing. She takes the rope, turns, and walks back to the gate.
She looked down into the dark and saw nothing. She took the rope, turned, and walked back to the gate.
A spell checker won’t see it. A reader will.
Tense shifts it leaves alone
A book is full of other tenses on purpose. So the check is careful:
- Dialogue. Characters speak in the present.
- Italic text. A character’s thoughts, often first person and present tense.
- Three or more paragraphs in a row told the other way. That’s a frame, a letter or a flashback, not a slip.
- Short paragraphs. A paragraph needs a few verbs before it can be judged.
And a single scene is judged by the whole book’s tense and person, so a first-person narrator watching other people isn’t mistaken for third person.
How Falcontext checks tense shifts and POV slips
Guidelines, not rules. A slip is only a slip if you didn’t mean it. Ignore the ones you did.
- Finds
- Paragraphs that slip out of the tense or point of view the rest of the book uses, each one marked in your text.
- Traffic light
- No slips
- 1–2 paragraphs
- 3 or more
Rewrites are the usual suspect: the old version of a scene in present tense, the new one in past.
This is where the scenes and dialogue pass of the self-editing guide starts: tense and point of view first, then the dialogue.
Ever found one of these after the book was already out?
Questions about tense shifts and POV slips.
How do I find tense changes in my novel?
Falcontext works out the tense and point of view your book is told in, then marks the paragraphs of narration that don’t follow it. Dialogue, italic thoughts and longer passages told another way (a letter, a frame) are left alone.
Does it flag present-tense dialogue in a past-tense book?
No. Dialogue isn’t counted, and neither is italic text, which is how most novels set a character’s thoughts.
Is the tense and POV checker free?
Yes. It reads the whole book to work out its tense, and that’s free too, however long the book.
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