Heather in Fairbanks, Alaska, asks why historians and documentary narrators sometimes describe past events in the present tense. This use of the historical present is a storytelling convention that creates immediacy. The historical present can be vivid and compelling, but inconsistency of its use when speaking can render it confusing. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Historian Uses Historical Present Even Though It’s All Past”
Hey there, you have A Way with Words. Good morning. My name is Heather and I’m calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.
Oh, welcome to the show, Heather. What can we do for you?
Well, something I have long found confusing is the use of present tense when speaking of past events, most often by historians and sometimes by radio journalists or others. So I have a bunch of questions about that. Who or what group decided that historians should follow this apparent convention?
All right. Where are you hearing this?
Radio, mostly.
Yeah. Any particular program or person?
No, lots where they have historians speaking.
Okay. Yeah.
And sometimes just radio journalists.
Yeah. There’s a clue there that I want to latch onto, and that’s the historian part of that. And you’ve got a couple pieces there. If we put them together, we’ve got our answer. And that is that there is a special tense of English called historical present. And that’s what they’re using. It’s an actual established tense where it sounds like the present tense, but it’s actually the past. It’s very confusing if you don’t know about it.
So why do they do that?
Well, it adds an immediacy to it. So they’re talking about the past events in a way that allows you to avoid those cognitive adjustments so that you’re not switching constantly back and forth between time periods. Those tense changes can disorient you. So you don’t have to track those causalities or move between timelines. And so it gives you this stable platform and it keeps the argument kind of fluid.
There’s a show on the BBC called In Our Time with Melvin Bragg, although I think he’s just retired, which is well known for this. And I think documentaries often do this. So when a historian writes that Caesar says or claims something, it’s because the texts and the information that we have exist right now. And we have them in our hands. The information that we know about is true and present, and it’s not a past event. The information is, it’s present, it’s real.
Do you have feelings about this, one way or the other, about this kind of presentation?
Yes, I do. Very confusing because apparently it’s very difficult for the people doing it verbally to follow consistently, and I hear almost every time historians switch between present and past tense when talking about past events because they don’t like to use past participle, subjunctive, and other tenses we were taught in school. And so I’m always having to guess whether, are they talking about nowadays or are they talking about the past?
I could see how it could be confusing, particularly if they’re inconsistent. It’s a tradition thing more than it is like one body of people got together and decided it would happen.
Okay. Thank you very much.
All right. Thanks for calling, Heather. Take care. Bye-bye.
Yeah. Appreciate your show.
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