The Grammar of Conviction
When we talk about a product we loved or a place we visited, grammar is usually the last thing on our minds. We focus on how it made us feel, what stayed with us, and whether it’s worth telling someone else about. But sometimes, the difference between a review that actually convinces and one we scroll past has nothing to do with the content itself, but rather something much smaller: verb tense.
Consider the difference between these two sentences:
“That restaurant was great.”
“That restaurant is great.”
They may say essentially the same thing, but they don’t feel the same: one sounds like recollection of an experience, and the other sounds like a claim. This distinction is at the heart of research by Grant Packard, Jonah Berger, and Reihane Boghrati on how verb tense shapes persuasion. Across large-scale analyses of online reviews and controlled experiments, they show that present tense language consistently makes opinions seem more helpful, more useful, and more persuasive than past tense language.
What’s particularly striking about the results of this research is not just the robustness of the effect, but how subtle it is: no new information is added, no stronger adjectives are used, and the opinion itself does not change. Only the tense does.
When someone uses past tense, they are anchoring their statement to a specific experience in time. “That movie was good” implicitly means it was good when I watched it. The statement feels personal, bounded, and subjective. Present tense works differently. “That movie is good” suggests something more general. It sounds less like a memory and more like an assertion about how things are. The speaker is no longer just reporting their experience. They are committing to a broader claim.
This matters because readers are constantly making inferences about the speaker, not just the product. Present tense makes the speaker seem more confident and more certain. And certainty plays a powerful role in persuasion.
In their analysis of over half a million Amazon and Yelp reviews, the authors of How Verb Tense Shapes Persuasion find that reviews using more present tense sentences receive higher helpfulness and usefulness ratings, even after controlling for length, readability, sentiment, product category, and dozens of other linguistic features. Changing just one sentence from past to present tense is associated with a measurable increase in perceived helpfulness.
Follow-up experiments help explain why this happens. When participants read present-tense recommendations, they not only reported higher interest in the product or destination, but they were also more likely to take action, such as choosing to learn more about it. Crucially, this effect was driven by perceived certainty. Present tense made the speaker seem more confident in what they were saying, and that confidence made the message more persuasive.
Importantly, when certainty was already made explicit through words like “definitely,” verb tense lost its powerful effect because the “confidence” signal had already been sent. This suggests that tense functions as a subtle cue: it communicates conviction without overtly trying to persuade.
Nevertheless, once you notice it, the present-tense pattern shows up everywhere: reviews use it to sound like advice rather than anecdotes, headlines use it to make outcomes feel settled, and maxims and rules are almost always in present because it gives them a sense of permanence. And the effect holds even for negative opinions, too. Saying “The service isn’t good” feels stronger and more consequential than “The service wasn’t good.” The former sounds like a warning. The latter sounds like a report of an instance when service was not good.
These findings confirm in a powerful way what linguists have known and been studying for years: that people extract huge meaning from small linguistic choices. Language does more than convey information, and grammar does more than organize our thoughts. Indeed, it signals confidence, generality, and commitment, among who-knows-what-else.
Even the smallest particle of the smallest word conveys meaning and impacts our interpretation of a sentence. Using language, then, is revealed to be quite a weighty responsibility: every word matters, every time.
Grant Packard, Jonah Berger, Reihane Boghrati, How Verb Tense Shapes Persuasion, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 50, Issue 3, October 2023, Pages 645–660, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad006
