Had once again!

What Maryn said.

Bob, echoing.

There has to be a reason for including the 'had' and the reason is context.

If, as seems to be the case, it's an 'out of the blue' comment with no reference to anything else or to the topic in hand you don't need it.

There's always a context, but we won't know it from a snippet.

If it's dialogue only you will know if it (the 'had') is needed.

SpiderGal said:

There is a context. I was mentioning to someone that I had confided in two of my colleagues that I wished to be ambidextrous.

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Oh good, a thread that's related to what I was thinking about last night. I was reading a short story in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Mag and came across a sentence similar to this (changed slightly to protect the source):

"Michelle's last visit with Tracy occurred about two years before. It was busy there in the county office. There was a position open, and the head clerk, after a long application procedure, had made it to the list for interviews."

Leading up to this new paragraph is character description of a newly-murdered victim. The story is written past tense, Michelle's POV.

My mind stumbled over the first sentence. I read it again, thinking, "There should be a 'had' after Tracy - 'Michelle's last visit with Tracy had occurred" would alert me that this had happened not the same day."

I hope I'm making sense, and I hope someone can explain it to me. The editor of this magazine is someone championed highly here by a longtime (and apparently frequently-published) AWer as "one of the best editors ever" so I must be reading this incorrectly ...

juniper said:

My mind stumbled over the first sentence. I read it again, thinking, "There should be a 'had' after Tracy - 'Michelle's last visit with Tracy had occurred" would alert me that this had happened not the same day."

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You're sort of right there, but the past tense could work, too, because, technically, all events are in the past from the time of story telling. Thus there's a shift of focus. Try it like this:

1. Past tense:

-----Story event1<-------Story telling
Story event 2<-----------Story telling

2. Past perfect:

Story event2<-----Story event1<-----Story telling

The author probably thought that "Michelle's last visit" was enough to make a timeskip obvious. Since this sort of thing is dependent on the relation of the story telling time, this works better in omniscient than in limited (i.e. if it was a hint that the character remembers her last visit, I'd be more likely to expect past perfect.)

To summarise, whether or not you need past perfect, in this case, is a question of narrative technique rather than grammar, and it depends on how much you emphasise the time of story telling (with more emphasis favouring simple past, and less emphasis favouring past perfect).

Only use the perfect tense if you're specifically talking about an event before the current:

"I had eaten the ice cream earlier and now I was having stomach pain."

In your example, it seems like you're speaking of a "previous workplace" situation while currently in a new workplace, so I think the past perfect is okay, as in:

"My boss and I talked during lunch, and I told him how I had confided in my colleagues at the previous workplace."

I think what made this paragraph sound off to me was that the writer *did* use a past perfect had in the third sentence but not the first. A simple had in the first one too would have made more sense to me.

juniper said:

Oh good, a thread that's related to what I was thinking about last night. I was reading a short story in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Mag and came across a sentence similar to this (changed slightly to protect the source):

"Michelle's last visit with Tracy occurred about two years before. It was busy there in the county office. There was a position open, and the head clerk, after a long application procedure, had made it to the list for interviews."

Leading up to this new paragraph is character description of a newly-murdered victim. The story is written past tense, Michelle's POV.

My mind stumbled over the first sentence. I read it again, thinking, "There should be a 'had' after Tracy - 'Michelle's last visit with Tracy had occurred" would alert me that this had happened not the same day."

I hope I'm making sense, and I hope someone can explain it to me. The editor of this magazine is someone championed highly here by a longtime (and apparently frequently-published) AWer as "one of the best editors ever" so I must be reading this incorrectly ...

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I think you're right, and the magazine was simply wrong. If you have a fairly long flashback, you can drop the perfect after the first time or two, but in your example, it was needed.

I just read a very good book (Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America, by Greg Farrell) whose author does this all the time, and it's annoying, but not annoying enough for me to stop reading. But it is a jar, and a "huh?" and a "wait a minute, I thought--" moment.

I find as often as not that, while use of had is grammatically correct in employing past perfect, it's not necessary - the context of the sentence/paragraph makes it clear enough.

Like in your sentence, the had is correct, and I think in that particular case perhaps necessary, and you could have correctly used it again before received, but wisely did not.

Pete Morin said:

Like in your sentence, the had is correct, and I think in that particular case perhaps necessary, and you could have correctly used it again before received, but wisely did not.

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Once you've established the time frame with a past perfect, you can drop it in later sentences.

Exactly.

And if we don't know the speaker's reason for using 'had' or whether or not in context the time frame has already been established we can't really comment on the necessity or otherwise of the 'had' in this case.

Strikes me as writer's choice and not really a grammar question to which there is a definitive yes or no.

maestrowork said:

Once you've established the time frame with a past perfect, you can drop it in later sentences.

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If you like, not if you don't like.

Pete Morin said:

I find as often as not that, while use of had is grammatically correct in employing past perfect, it's not necessary - the context of the sentence/paragraph makes it clear enough.

Like in your sentence, the had is correct, and I think in that particular case perhaps necessary, and you could have correctly used it again before received, but wisely did not.

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Really? It doesn't bother you as a reader? It drives me nuts, makes me re-read the whole sentence to see where I went wrong.