I don't mean to be sloppy,

[chicating]

or haphazard or what-have-you but sometimes I wonder if readers really care about subtle gradations in tense and so forth that I apparently don't quite capture from draft to draft(Yes, annoying as it can be sometimes to not be a natural prose stylist, if there is such a thing, I know that is what drafts are for.Still, sometimes it makes me nuts

Comments

[aud_woman_in]

Depends on what you mean by "subtle gradations in tense," but I personally am kind of fanatical about timeline consistency, so anything that muddies that I find irritating. OTOH, sometimes you want to create some vagueness - either for the reader or between characters. So, yeah, the author's intention seems important.

I suppose

[chicating]

I could stand to be more precise...it's not just tenses, I guess, although some constructions do sometimes make that complicated for me.