Thread:Cdragon13/@comment-25297120-20141028063732/@comment-18063949-20141028145559

Hello Cyan Wind!

You are always welcome here. Yes, that is very true. Of course, I'd be more than happy to help you.

I noticed that as well. A lot of the badge pages were edited by many users together, just making minor edits, I believe, and the tenses were mixed up.

For the example you put, I'd say either one works well, but to have it seem less wordy, "To earn this badge, users had to..." would be good. It also depends on the sentence construction (eg. the rest of the sentence).

Taking from the example and the page you linked, the sentence "To earn this badge, users had to earn (30,000 * the number of team members) energy points (or more) along with other users in a week", I would say that "To earn this badge..." would be best as the word "had" is already in use. (Also, I would change "...had to earn (30,000 * the number of team members) energy points..." to  "...had to achieve/obtain/receive..." because "earn" is already used in the beginning of the sentence.)

About repetitive words, there aren't really many synonyms for these types of words, when used in context, that would convey the appropriate meaning in the articles. I'd stick with continuing to use these words, but if you want to use a couple different ones, you could say "achievements" instead of "badges", but make it's clear they mean the same thing. (eg. If you have two sentences in the same article: "To earn this badge, users have to achieve mastery in any 500 arbitrary exercises. This badge motivates users to achieve proficiency by practicing more exercises, especially Math ones." You could change one of the sentences to include "achievement" instead of "users" -> "This achievement motives users...")

I think, as a native English-speaker, that it is really common in English not to differentiate between different types of tenses and basically lump them together into Past, Present and Future. As we grow up learning English, we don't learn the names of the "sub-tenses", so to say (eg: Past Cont., Past Perf., etc...). We just learn how to use them correctly, and we end up mixing them all together.

Hope this helps you at least a little bit! I am so sorry if this is confusing (I don't know if I explained it well), and if you have any questions at all, feel free to ask me!

Take care!

Cdragon13 ~a beautiful storm in your eyes