Grammar Police examine future conditional tense to help you make more money

(Photo by Laverrue)

If you pay close attention to understanding grammar, then your writing will be more polished. You’ll sell more writing if you write better – learn future conditional. Hang around with a crowd of people younger than, say, 40 (arbitrary number, but somewhere in  there) and you'll notice the impending disappearance of a verb tense called future (the tense of the verb in question) conditional (the mood) which illustrates imaginary situations that take place at a future time.

When using future conditional, the idea is to explain if this, then that sort of thoughts. Example: If I had a legal degree I would be making a lot more money.

Maybe composing such sentences by the rules is too many words for a fast-lane population to put together when they can simply convert it all to a present tense. Example: If I've got a legal degree, I'm rich. (A construct against the rules, and not easily understood in many cases.)

Listen to sports announcers and you'll hear, with alarming regularity, stuff like "I'm Arnold Palmer, I got my pick of product endorsements," when what is meant is "If I were Arnie, I would have my pick of..."

Conditional mood comes in a couple of flavors. One is real conditional, the other unreal conditional. Real explains situations like, "When I go to my mother's this weekend, I'll help her weed the garden." It's something you will do in a specific instance that will likely happen in the future.

Unreal is all about something that will not likely come to pass. Like this: If pigs could fly, I'd believe your statement.

A third option is something on the order of, "Like I got a day off every week so I goes to the beach."

But that's just...wrong. Learn more about future conditional.