Cutting the length of stories remains the broadcast editor's main task even
with the severely reduced volume of copy which the selection process
retains. The copy editor makes the main additional cut by deleting entire
sentences. The news agencies are press-orientated, and often transmit stories containing 40 or more sentences. Some stories which are only 2-5
sentences long may be broadcast without sentence deletions. Long wires
with more than a dozen sentences run to three or more pages of teleprinted
copy, and usually the first page only is used. For medium-length wires, often
the first 2-3 sentences are used, together with one or more sentences from
the middle or end of the story. Most sentence deletions can be performed
without requiring any changes in the remaining sentences of a story. The
most common consequent change occurs when the deleted sentence contains
the antecedent of a pronoun which occurs in a later sentence and which must
then be depronominalized.