I used to write articles for Time, Rolling Stone, Wired and a few others including Penthouse and Hustler. The Editors always told me to use lots of extra words, like as many as I can all the time to fill up lots of space.to help make it look like readers were getting lots of bang for their buck.
Old habits die hard!
This post was edited by Kittigate at January 10, 2022 7:29 PM MST
The word “can” denotes present tense or subjective mood, yet you’re referring to actions that both started in the past and ended in the past, and the tense and the mood of your sentence is the past.