I have part of a description that reads like this:
“A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as they [are] [call] [here] [–] [surge] north along”
Notice the substitutions there to handle tense. Here is the output:
In first person, past tense:
A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they was called there — surged north along
In first person, present tense:
A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they is calls here — surges north along
In second person, present tense:
A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they is calls here — surges north along
Basically no matter what I try, it’s not quite getting it right. So I suspect I’m missing something obvious. I have a whole bunch of examples like this from an author workshop so here I’m taking one of the simplest.
I have read the adaptive text chapter in the manual but while it’s very prescriptive, I run into lots of cases where I can’t quite figure out how to get things working the way I want, short of changing my descriptions to get around the problems.
I did notice that I could add one more substitution:
[they] [are] [call] [here]
That would create (in first person, past tense):
A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as it was called there — surged north along
So it feels like the issue is that there’s really nothing to provide context for the substitution since “perambulators” in this case is just text.
I guess what I’m groping for is a way to say that “for this substitution, pretend something that was plural came before it.” Is that possible?