Hello, and welcome to presentation strategy six technique three, plan your Unity's and stick with them. Plan your Unity's and stick with them. Probably the first question that people will have in this particular technique is what is a unity? And that's a good question. A unity would be something like a pronoun reference, a point of view, a verb, tense, mood, tone, and style. Those are things that they're called unities because you want to pick one and then stick with it through out your piece.

So if you say use past tense, and there's no reason to shift into present tense, if there is you would want to do that. But if you're in past tense and you stay in past tense, that's a unity because you're unifying the tense throughout the piece and keeping it consistent. And so just to repeat some of those pronoun reference point of view, like first person, second person, third person, that kind of everlast pronoun reference, ie tense verb tense mood, which we talked about in one of the previous techniques, tone, and sometimes tone shifts, it just depends on the situation and style. And those are some of the things you want to try to keep consistent throughout the piece and some of them also overlap with some of the other techniques and some of the other strategies that we have talked about or we will talk about.

So try to keep them consistent unless there's a specific reason to shift them. An example. I went to Tybee Island for the day at 2pm. I am chopping on fried pickles at spankings when my ex walks in. That's where for no apparent reason the verb tense shifts. Once again, when we're telling stories and when we're speaking people tend to do this a lot.

But it's really important in our writing to make sure that we keep the verb tense consistent, unless there's a specific reason for shifting it. So here are two corrections either one could work. There's this always been this debate between is it better to use Past tense or present tense when you're narrating or writing fiction, and I think it just depends on the personal choice of the writer, the situation their style, you have to use your instincts to figure out what works best. But in one case here is present tense and in another case past tense. I go to Tybee Island for the day at 2pm. A chomp on fried pickles at spankings when my ex walks in the verb tenses consistently present tense there.

And then I went to Tybee Island for the day at 2pm. I was chomping on fried pickles at spankings when my ex walked in. So there's more of a past tense consistency there in that correction, so it's not shifting back and forth. And so just to reiterate, technique, three, plan your Unity's and stick with them, and that would apply to all of the things that I listed earlier and there may be others as well. So you would want to think consciously about it. It might even be helpful to write down what is my verb tense here.

Is there any situation where I need to shift it? What is my pronoun reference? What is my point of view? What is my mood, what is my tone, my style and if you write those down and keep them with you as you're writing the piece I think that will really help in keeping consistent Unity's throughout the piece.