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I was doing a grammar exercise about clauses with past perfect and past simple. I got the answer, but I want to understand the reason. This is the question -

The doorbell woke me up. When the doorbell _______________, I _______________ up.

Options -

  1. had rung, woke
  2. rang, had woken
  3. rang, woke
  4. The correct answer is 3. But why? Shouldn't we use the past participle for the doorbell ringing (had rung) and simple past for the second clause (woke u)? The correct answer is 3. But why? Shouldn't we use the past participle for the doorbell ringing (had rung) and simple past for the second clause (woke up)?
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  • Idiomatically 3 is the correct answer. However where the two events do not have such an immediate relationship - the past perfect is used eg. "When the electricity had been restored I started the machine".
    – WS2
    Feb 17, 2022 at 7:58
  • The two events (the door bell ringing and your waking up) happened simultaneously, so the tenses should be the same, i.e. simple past "rang" and "woke".
    – BillJ
    Feb 17, 2022 at 10:03

3 Answers 3

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The two events occur at the same time in the past, with the ringing causing you to wake up. If you use "had rung" this would suggest that the ringing had completely finished without waking you up, and then (sometime later) you woke up.

Similarly it would be grammatically correct to use "rang" and "had woken". That would mean that you were already awake when the doorbell rang.

But the first sentence provides sufficient context to show that neither of these are correct.

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  • Thank you for the detailed explanation.
    – gbrms
    Feb 17, 2022 at 8:10
  • I also read this in the same grammar course I'm taking- When the time order is clear, it is usually wrong to use the past perfect tense. It would be confusing if we told all of our stories in the past perfect. For example, we had watched a movie yesterday. We had been late to the theater, but I had enjoyed the movie. Instead, we simply use the past simple tense. We watched a movie yesterday. We were late to the theater, but I enjoyed the movie anyway. Could you please explain this one to me?Does this mean,if the ordering of events is obvious from context, we shouldn't use past perfect?
    – gbrms
    Feb 17, 2022 at 8:46
  • Yes. Don't use the past perfect just because some event happens before another event. It exists only to describe events that occurred before the time that the narrative is describing. "Past perfect" is often the last tense to be taught, it is also the rarest. Less than 1% of clauses use this tense.
    – James K
    Feb 17, 2022 at 8:47
  • Could you please give an example of that?
    – gbrms
    Feb 17, 2022 at 8:48
  • "Yesterday I made coffee, drank it to wake myself up. Then I went to work". (No past perfect, The time of the narrative moves forward) But "Yesterday I went to work. I'd made myself coffee and I'd drunk it to wake myself up" (past perfect because at the time of the narrative the coffee had already been made)
    – James K
    Feb 17, 2022 at 8:53
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It is better to use 'rang, woke'.

When one action comes straight after another, we use the simple past tense for both. We use when to mean ‘(at) the time that’.

rang, woke

We can use the past perfect to say that one thing finished and then something else happened.

had rung, woke

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-1

Idiomatically 3 is the correct answer. However where the two events do not have such an immediate relationship - the past perfect is used eg. When the electricity had been restored I started the machine.

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