Simple Past Vs. Past Perfect

In this article we will compare the following two tenses:

Simple Past (I did) Vs. Past Perfect (I had done)

Concept 1

We use the past perfect when we want to talk about a past situation or activity that took place:

• before another past situation or activity or
• before a particular time in the past

To simply talk about a single activity or event in the past - We use the past simple (rather than the past perfect).

Compare the following sentences:

When the band stopped playing, everyone left. (simple past; they left after the band stopped playing)
When the band stopped playing, everyone had left. (past perfect; they left before the band stopped playing)

I left when you called. (simple past; you called and then I left)
I had left when you called. (past perfect; I had already left and then you called)

Concept 2

So, now we know that we use past perfect tense when we talk about two actions taking place in the past, one after the other.

But note that in such sentences we use simple past too.

• The action which took place earlier (first action) - will be in past perfect tense and
• The action which took place later (second action) - will be in simple past tense.

When the band stopped playing, everyone had left. (first action – had left, in past perfect; second action – stopped, in simple past)

I saw her before she spotted me. (incorrect)
I had seen her before she spotted me. (correct; first action – had seen, in past perfect; second action – spotted, in simple past)

Concept 3

Consider the following series of past events.

When we write about a series of past events, we can just use simple past tense if we are putting the events in chronological order.

So, we will write the above events as follows:

There were large scale riots in Rawalpindi in August 1947. So, my parents migrated to India in September. Thereafter, we moved to Ireland in 1983. (were, migrated, moved – simple past tense)

However, if we want to refer to an event out of order, then we need to use the present perfect. We often do so to structure better sounding paragraphs.

We can rephrase the previous paragraph as follows:

My parents migrated to India in September. There had been large scale riots in Rawalpindi in August 1947. Thereafter, we moved to Ireland in 1983. (migrated, moved – simple past tense; had been – past perfect tense)

The riots took place earlier, but we mentioned it later in the paragraph. That’s why we used past perfect for it.

So keep in mind that to refer to an event out of order, we use past perfect (i.e. for something that happened before the last event we talked about).