ceigered:

One way to distinguish them is by using participles:
"One candidate was eating then started to cough up blood."
Unu el la kandidatoj, manĝante, komencis tusi sangon.
"One candidate ate then coughed up blood."
Unu el la kandidatoj, manĝinte, komencis tusi sangon.

@ceigered raised a important question about style in Esperanto. I thought Tekstaro could help but then I realized "estis *inta" won't work. So, any idea?

Miland:

ceigered:

One way to distinguish them is by using participles:
"One candidate was eating then started to cough up blood."
Unu el la kandidatoj, manĝante, komencis tusi sangon.
"One candidate ate then coughed up blood."
Unu el la kandidatoj, manĝinte, komencis tusi sangon.

Great idea Miland - in fact, one of the best solutions for complex approaching tenses, maybe?

LyzTyphone:I thought Tekstaro could help but then I realized "estis *inta" won't work. So, any idea?

Don't use "*". Use a specific phrase, e.g. estis farinta will bring up plenty of examples.

ceigered:Great idea Miland - in fact, one of the best solutions for complex approaching tenses, maybe?

Dankon. I'm sure you meant "approaching complex tenses".

ceigered:True, but considering this is meant to be a project... How does one write in "essay" or other technical writing forms in Esperanto? Generally, in technical writing, one tries to use the most precise language possible (in the most simplest terms), and that also includes tense (e.g. "one candidate was eating then started to cough up blood" and "one candidate ate then coughed up blood" have some differences in their meanings).

Uh, interesting example about candidates coughing up blood!

To answer your question, one way to sound more high class in Esperanto is to avoid combination forms like "devintus", which some people frown upon. That is, you could be very careful to use language that everyone agrees upon, without grammatical innovations that are relatively new.

Other than that, there aren't many changes. Esperanto has survived not through speaking, but through writing, since for much of its existence, writing was the main means of communication between speakers who didn't live near each other. The difference between Esperanto's spoken and its written form is not very great. An speaker who has mastered Esperanto at a fluent level will be speaking just about the same language that you'd use in a technical document. Their grammar will be roughly the same either way. The main difference will be the less orderly way that people speak versus writing. So for example, I might write in a document, "She and her mother went to the store", but I might verbally tell someone "She went to the store, and also her mother". That is, we remember things that we meant to add, and we add them, perhaps at the end of a sentence. In writing, we think through our entire meaning before we write it down, so the information will be less cobbled-together and it will flow better.

Miland:

ceigered:Great idea Miland - in fact, one of the best solutions for complex approaching tenses, maybe?

Dankon. I'm sure you meant "approaching complex tenses".

No no no, I clearly meant "tenses complex approaching"!
(Cheers Miland, I don't know how I make such stupid errors )

@ Erinja:
Cheers for that information, so effectively the normal writing style in EO will just be the same as spoken Esperanto, but showing more ordered thought processes?

Also we (the general English forum) have talked about Devintus once before, right? Like this thread, but this one was a bit before I came here.

As for candidates coughing up drugs, I was thinking in some drug-testing situation, involving some disease that doesn't let people eat food properly. I was in a rush for an example so I made up a new medical condition on the spot