Re: usage of had: past perfect
hello,
good morning!
i had boarded the wrong bus first and then got down at salt lake and boarded the right one ---- ARE THE SENTENCE AND THE USAGE OF 'HAD' CORRECT?
can you please tell me the correct usage of "HAD"? it is quite confusing for me.
thanks and regards,
rita
You
only use the past perfect tense
if you need to. You don't automatically use it when you narrate two things that happened in the past.
"I boarded the wrong bus first and then got down at Salt Lake and boarded the right one."
There is no problem understanding the time-line of the events, so you use the simple past.
"I did A first, and then I did B. After that I went to C, bought some D and ate some E."
If you use time adverbs like this, you usually don't need the past perfect.
You can use the past perfect like this:
"I got off the bus at Salt Lake and boarded a different one, because I realised that I had boarded the wrong bus back in Denver."
"Because I had boarded the wrong bus in Denver, I had to get off at Salt Lake and find the right one."
Note that there are no time adverbs in these sentences. The past perfect here clarifies i) the time sequence, and ii) the reason for getting off the bus.
Often, you use the past perfect like this when the two clauses have some relatedness to each other that you want to point out.
("Because I had done A, I had to do B".)
While that is implicit in your original sentence, you don't emphasise the relatedness with "because, since..." etc.
