ABSTRACT
Style is crucial. In fact, most newspaper editing texts devote whole chapters to explaining all its rules. Editors cannot do their jobs well without thorough knowledge of the style being used by their publication or site. Editors routinely make certain a story mainly uses one tense. Present, past and future are the primary tenses, with most news stories, either in print or online, being in past tense. Feature writing in magazines often makes use of present tense. Writers sometimes move from using one kind of verbal to another. For example: The land developer liked hiking, swimming and to go on picnics. The sentence switches from gerunds to an infinitive. Editors must be attuned to placement of elements within sentences. If a phrase or clause is not placed near the element it modifies, readers are momentarily confused, thus causing a fog to drift over sentence clarity.
