Return to Answer

In my opinion, the writer could make the sentence clearer by changing a few words. They could use whenever instead of when. This would help us understand that this might be a recurring situation. Secondly, the writer could use the word recently or just. This would reinforce that the present perfect is to show the anteriority (earlier-ness) of the breaking news event:

In my opinion, the writer could make the sentence clearer by changing a few words. They could use whenever instead of when. This would help us understand that this might be a recurring situation. Secondly, the writer could use the word recently or just. This would reinforce that the present perfect is being used to show the anteriority (earlier-ness) of the breaking news event:

Notes:

Seeing the quote from this brain surgeon in a different context might help with understanding the situation. If you're a language teacher, teaching IELTS for example, it's striking how much the right context makes the sentence completely felicitous.

Dr. Henry Marsh writes beautifully about how difficult it can be to find the balance between optimism and realism. In one memorable passage, Dr. Marsh shows a house officer a scan of a highly malignant brain tumor and asks him what he would say to the patient. The trainee reflexively hides behind jargon, skirting around what he knew to be the truth: This tumor would kill her. Marsh presses him to admit that he’s lying, before lamenting at how hard it is to improve these critical communication skills: “When I have had to break bad news I never know whether I have done it well or not. The patients aren’t going to ring me up afterward and say, ‘Mr. Marsh, I really liked the way you told me that I was going to die,’ or ‘Mr. Marsh, you were crap.’ You can only hope that you haven’t made too much of a mess of it.”

One of the reasons why this sentence is easy to understand here is that we have a deep understanding of the importance of this problem for the future. The sentence does not - indeed cannot - be just a description of the past. It's a description of what the doctor has always experienced - but more importantly what the trainee and the doctor are both going to continue to experience every time that they have had to break this bad news. It's a situation that all such doctors have to go through.

^{This is from a review of the book in ASC Surgery News}

Seeing the quote from this brain surgeon in a different context might help with understanding the situation. If you're a language teacher, teaching IELTS or TOEFL, for example, it's striking how much understanding context makes the sentence completely felicitous.

One of the reasons why this sentence is easy to understand here is that we have a deep understanding of the importance of this problem for the future. The sentence does not - indeed cannot - be just a description of the past. It's a description of what the doctor has always experienced - but more importantly what the trainee and the doctor are both going to continue to experience every time that they have had to break this bad news. It's a situation that all such doctors will have to go through.

Seeing the quote from this brain surgeon in a different context might help with understanding the situation. If you're a language teacher, teaching IELTS for example, it's striking how much the right context makes the sentence completely felicitous.

One of the reasons why this sentence is easy to understand here is that we have a deep understanding of the importance of this problem for the future. The sentence does not - indeed cannot - be just a description of the past. It's a description of what the doctor has always experienced - but more importantly what the trainee and the doctor are both going to continue to experience every time that they have had to break this bad news. It's a situation that all such doctors have to go through.