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What is the correct tense to use in an academic paper when speaking about correspondence? Say one of my source materials is a letter written by someone named William, in which he says he went to t...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/5206 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
What is the correct tense to use in an academic paper when speaking about correspondence? Say one of my source materials is a letter written by someone named William, in which he says he went to the store. Would I say > William writes that he went to the store. or > William wrote that he went to the store. If William was an author and I was discussing a book he wrote, it would be the former. Is that true for correspondence as well?