Dear Scientists,

I have a problem with your language and I'll provide a couple of examples and I hope you can explain why "after the fact" an article is written like it is happening as it was being written.

I'm going to use the first paragraph of the linked article as there are two examples.

1st. "We examine the correlation...." Why not we examined?

2nd. "We calculate both CFS...." Why not we calculated?

Frankly, it seem bass akwards to me. The experiment was already performed, so how it can it be written like is happening now, not then? Gosh, this drives nuts.

Then while I'm on this language issue, can anyone explain why abstracts have no paragraphs? It's just one huge long paragraph. Is it to save space?

Ok. This article is quite interesting and well worth the read regardless of the "tenses." It brings up a lot of questions of which they don't have all of the answers and it is refreshing that someone acknowledges they don't know everything.

Thanks in advance for your time,

Petra

• Aftershock Triggering