{"id":114,"date":"2008-01-19T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2008-01-19T18:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/the-following-tests-will-be-ran\/"},"modified":"2015-03-31T15:10:40","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T21:10:40","slug":"the-following-tests-will-be-ran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/01\/the-following-tests-will-be-ran\/","title":{"rendered":"“The following tests will be ran.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this in a technical presentation. (Ouch!)<\/p>\n

Problem:<\/strong>
\nThe wrong verb form is used in this sentence.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\nThe Purdue University Online Writing Lab has an examples page about verb tenses and voices. A thorough discussion of English verbs<\/a> appears at Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

The sentence that I saw in the presentation was meant to be in the simple future tense and in passive voice.<\/p>\n

We can confirm that the correct verb form is “run” — not “ran” — for this sentence by consulting Wikipedia’s set of conjugation tables<\/a> for the English language’s model regular verbs and for some of its most common irregular verbs.<\/p>\n

Another handy tool for several thousand English verbs is the verb-conjugations tool that is located here<\/a>. The “Scientific Psychic” (SP) website where this tool is located is a bit quirky, but the tool seems to work well. You might like the Verbix tool<\/a> instead; although it’s much pickier than the SP tool about input, its output is more thorough than SP’s output.<\/p>\n

Here is an unorthodox but still fairly reliable method to determine which of “will be ran” or “will be run” is the correct form: search Google separately for each of “will be ran” and “will be run” with the quotation marks included in each search; the one with the dominant number of hits or matches is very likely the correct form (unless the language has fallen apart on the Web!).<\/p>\n

For example, I just searched Google for “will be ran” and got about 31,400 matches; I searched for “will be run” and got about 568,000 matches. The 18:1 dominance of “will be run” over “will be ran” is a very good indicator that “will be run” is the correct form.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this method also can depress you. Finding 31,400 matches for “will be ran” is depressing, especially when the top matches are from governmental entitities such as the State of Michigan, the University of Idaho, a high school in Iowa, a school district in North Carolina, and a commission of fire protection in Kentucky. That’s the price that you pay for an unorthodox method, I suppose. <\/p>\n

If seeing Google return 31,400 matches for “will be ran” raises your fear for the future of our country’s literacy, then I recommend that you consider making a donation to First Book<\/a>, about which I have written an article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Solution:<\/strong>
\n“The following tests will be run.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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