gth of time, care must be taken to keep the different
incidents separated in point of time so that the reader may understand
readily the relation of the different events to each other. The tenses
of the verbs, too, must be kept consistent, logical. One cannot shift at
will from past time to the present, and vice versa. If the story is a
follow-up of an event that occurred before to-day and has been written
up before, the body of the story should contain a sufficient summary of
the preceding events to make the details readily clear to all
readers,--even though the lead may already have included a connecting
link. The summary of events in the lead must necessarily have been
brief; the review in the body of the story may be presented at greater
length.

=132. Coherence.=--A valuable aid in gaining clearness is a proper
regard for coherence, for obtaining which there are four ways within a
story: (1) by arrangement of the facts and statements in a natural
sequence of ideas; (2) by use of pronouns; (3) by repetition; and (4) by
use of relation words, phrases, and clauses. Discussion has already been
given, in Chapter VIII, on the organization of material, of the
necessity of logical arrangement of the story. If one has made a proper
grouping there, one will have taken the first step, and the surest,
toward adequate coherence. Of the three remaining methods, probably the
greatest newspaper men are strongest in their use of pronouns, such as
_these_, _those_, _that_, _them_, etc. They also avail themselves freely
of a skillful repetition of words,--the third method, which stands
almost, but not quite equal to the use of pronouns in effectiveness and
frequency. The following fire story exhibits a happy repetition of words
for holding the ideas in easy sequence. Note in it the skillful
repetition of _firemen_, _fire_, _whiskey_, _building_, _casks_,
_canal_.

| =$750,000 WORTH OF WHISKEY BURNS= |
| |
|Firemen had to fight a canal full of blazing whiskey|
|here to-day when a fire broke out in the building of|
|the Distillery Company, Ltd. Twelve thousand casks |
|of liquor were stored in the building. The |
|conflagration spread rapidly and the explosion of |
|the casks released the whiskey, which made a burning|
|stream of the canal. |
|