Thread: way to say

I saw a sentence in a book: "We ran around the house trying to rescue whatever we could from the rising floodwater"

Is it more natural to use "continuous" tence in the main clause, i.e. "We were running around the house trying to rescue whatever we could from the rising floodwater"

???
TiA !!!

Both sentences are grammatically correct, and without further context it is impossible to say which sounds more natural, or even whether they are interchangable.

Originally Posted by scotcher

Both sentences are grammatically correct, and without further context it is impossible to say which sounds more natural, or even whether they are interchangable.

Could you make up contexts for each variants?

Right....erm...

"We ran around the house..." is just a simple, self-contained statment. It is either setting up the next event in a sequence:

"We ran around the house... blah blah... Then the wall collapsed and all the water came flooding in."

or setting a context to describe the consequence of the action:

"We ran around the house... blah blah... but we didn't manage to save much of our furniture."

"We were running..." would not work in either of these contexts.



Wheras "We were running around the house..." creates a temporal context for the description of another event which happened concurrently. For example:

"We were running around the house... blah blah... when there was an explosion".

The point here is the explosion, the rest of the sentence just gives it context.

"We ran..." does not work in this context.

It helps!!! Thank you very much!!!

You're welcome.