06 - Narration and the "past simple"

Generally speaking, the past simple (le préterit) is used as the main tense for narrating events which took place in the past.  There is no historical present in English as in French.  For example:

- Rembrandt painted the Night Watch in 1642.
- The French settled Louisiana and the American Mid-West in the early 18th century.

If your paper presents a test/experiment conducted, you may want to use the past simple to explain what you did, eg:

-Data was collected from ...
-We then applied certain techniques to make it compatible.
-The results we obtained ... indicate that... (in this case, the results were obtained before writing up the experiment).