General English B2 · Lesson 3A

Grammar Bank

The rules behind this lesson — form, use, model sentences and the mistakes to avoid.

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Grammar focus of this lesson

narrative tenses + so / such …that

1 structure

Narrative tenses · past perfect continuous · so / such…that
Layering past events so the story has depth and order.
I've got this
Rules & form
- ›Past simple: main events. Past continuous: background in progress.
- ›Past perfect: an earlier event; past perfect continuous: an earlier ongoing activity.
- ›so + adjective/adverb + that · such (a) + noun phrase + that.
- ›Time linkers: by the time, as soon as, no sooner… than.
Examples
- “By the time we arrived, they had already signed with someone else.”
- “We'd been negotiating for months when the market shifted.”
- “It was such a chaotic launch that we rewrote the whole process.”
Watch out · Don't use the past perfect for everything — only for what happened earlier.
Your own example