My job -- and there are not many like me left -- is to intervene in a comprehensive way in the appalling, sloppy and fractured copy written by professional journalists who have supposedly been trained. But for one or two rare exceptions (both coming from the Rhodes journalism course), they cannot connect information in a logical sequence or write a sentence more complex than the simple declarative. A ghastly method has been evolved to expand these by creating unreadable trains of adjectives from words that never had a clue they were at all adjectival. They call this "active" writing. But it is a quagmire. How are they going to compile a coherent narrative from this jumble? Let's just forget about good writing, that doesn't come into it. And what happens when rewrite/splash subs like me die out?

DavetheF