Past Perfect

The past perfect, also called the pluperfect, is a verb tense used to talk about something that happened before something else that is also in the past. Imagine waking up one morning and stepping outside to grab the newspaper. On your way back in, you notice a mysterious message scrawled across your front door: “Tootles was here.” When you’re telling this story to your friends later, how will you describe this moment? You might say something like:

I turned back to the house and saw that someone named Tootles had defaced my front door!

The past perfect formula

The formula for the past perfect tense is had + [past participle]. It doesn’t matter if the subject is singular or plural; the formula doesn’t change.

When to use the past perfect

So what’s the difference between the past perfect and the simple past? When you’re talking about some point in the past and want to reference an event that happened even earlier, using the past perfect allows you to convey the sequence of the events. It’s also clearer and more specific. Consider the difference between these two sentences:

We were relieved that Tootles used washable paint.

We were relieved that Tootles had used washable paint.

It’s a subtle difference, but the first sentence doesn’t tie Tootles’s act of using washable paint to any particular moment in time; listeners might interpret it as “We were relieved that Tootles was in the habit of using washable paint.” In the second sentence, the past perfect makes it clear that you’re talking about a specific instance of using washable paint.

When not to use the past perfect

Don’t use the past perfect when you’re not trying to convey some sequence of past events. If your friends asked what else you did this morning besides discovering the graffiti, they would be confused if you said:

I had cleaned it off the door.

They’d likely be waiting for you to go on to describe what happened next because using the past perfect implies that your action of cleaning the door occurred before something else happened. The “something else” doesn’t always have to be explicitly mentioned, but context needs to make it clear. In this case there’s no context, so the past perfect doesn’t make sense.

How to make the past perfect negative

The formula for asking a question in the past perfect tense is had + [subject] + [past participle].

Example : Had Tootles caused trouble in other neighborhoods before they struck ours?