I’m having difficulty explaining why I don’t see a problem with the sentence:
She would be making a fortune, if she had done the smart thing.
Someone suggested I should change it to:
She would have been making a fortune, if she had done the smart thing.
I think both are fine. To me, the first is focused on her current continued wealth generation, while the second focuses on the length of time she would have been accumulating wealth. I don’t know if one or the other is more grammatical though…
Any thoughts?
Top Answer/Comment:
The OP is right. Both sentences are correct, though they mean different things.
Grammar books give learners useful outlines of conditional sentences and their related tenses. But those learners need to realize that tenses are also chosen to communicate the intended meaning of the writer. In real life the intended meaning is flexible and the related tenses are equally flexible.
Consider these conditional sentences:
If I win the lottery I will buy a yacht and spend the rest of my life sailing round the world.
If I won the lottery I would buy a yacht and spend the rest of my life sailing round the world.
Sentence 1 is a real condition, hence the simple future tense ("If I win... I will..."). Sentence 2 is an unreal condition ("If I won ... I would..."). The practical difference is that I would say sentence 1 if I actually had a lottery ticket. But I would say sentence 2 if I didn't buy tickets but only dreamed of what I would hypothetically do.
Notice the tenses. The actions are both equally future, so the tense pattern is all the same and all future. But now see what happens if we back shift the condition:
If I had won the lottery ten years ago I would have bought a yacht and spent the rest of my life sailing round the world.
If I had won the lottery ten years ago I would have bought a yacht and be spending the rest of my life sailing round the world.
Here the basic grammar for a past tense unreal condition is "If I had ... I would have ..." But sentences 3 and 4 show it's not that simple. The yacht purchase is a past event. But the action of sailing round the world is a lifetime event. The tenses are past, present and future. "Would have been sailing" and "Would be sailing" can both be correct depending on my intended focus.
