Came Or Was Coming?

Question

I (come) "came" in very late last night and unfortunately the dog (wake) "woke"up and (start) "started" to bark. This (wake) "woke"
my mother who (come) came/ was coming to the top of the stairs and (say) "said" Which one is correct? Came or was coming?

Philip · Accepted Answer

You are talking about six actions that happened at virtually the same time.  I would use the simple past for all.

Laborious · Answer

AnonymousThis (wake) "woke"my mother who (come) came/ was coming to the top of the stairs

AnonymousWhich one is correct? Came or was coming?

Actually, neither is correct. You need to recast the above sentence to something like: This woke my mother who was sleeping upstairs.

This means the barking of the dog interrupted the action 'sleeping'. One of the uses of the past continuous tense is we use it to talk about a continuous action that is interrupted by a shorter action (the dog's barking).

Laborious · Answer

And yes, as Philip said, you can also use the past simple form "came" to describe the order of the events in the past, but using "was coming" would certainly be wrong there.

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And I'd like to apologise to you for not giving careful attention to your post before replying.

Came Or Was Coming?

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