A burglar stood in front of the house

[Bassim]

I am wondering if my sentences are grammatically correct.

A burglar stood in front of a house. He looked at both sides of the badly lit street, and when he saw that nobody was in sight, he sneaked into the house through the half-open window. A few minutes later, he jumped out of the same window, carrying a large LCD TV, before running into the darkness.

 

[teechar]

It's okay, but consider using "poorly" instead of "badly" in the above.

 

[emsr2d2]

He "snuck" into the house in my variant of BrE.

 

[emsr2d2]

I have always thought of 'snuck' as an AmE form.

Really? That's interesting. I was always led to believe that the irregular past tenses that I was taught at an early age and have used all my life (such as snuck, dove, earnt, learnt) were peculiar to BrE, and that AmE was more likely to simply add -ed to the base infinitive for most simple past forms.

 

[emsr2d2]

My (definitely not American!) grandfather and father both detested the use of "dived" and would shout at the TV if a commentator used it, and always corrected anyone who said it instead of "dove".

 

[Rover_KE]

I disagree with you both about earnt, which I consider to be non-standard.

 

[GoesStation]

Americans are increasingly using pled in favor of pleaded as the simple past of "to plead". Have you been hearing that in BrE?

The general tendency is for frequently-used single-syllable verbs to develop irregular past tenses and for irregular form to fade away as verbs fall out of use.

 

[Rover_KE]

I have spelt it earnt all my life. That's what I learnt at school. I never dreamt that anyone would consider it non-standard.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...are=&direct_url=t1;,earned;,c0;.t1;,earnt;,c0
https://www.onelook.com/?w=earnt&ls=a