Strunk & White devote a lot of time to misrepresenting grammar and presenting rules that don't mean much. Both of these distract an author from writing with irrelevant questions of passive voices and adjectives.
The problem with The Elements of Style is that White flagrantly, persistently and delightfully violates his own rules. Given that his writing is unfailingly charming and enjoyable to read, I have to wonder about value of those rules.
The Elements of Style (which I personally dislike) isn't written for professional writers, it's written for non-professionals.
In today's culture people are barely capable of writing a sentence without losing half the vowels along the way, and god forbid you're American because you already lost half your U's before you were even born. Forget about adequate grammar, or even half-decent spelling.
White is a professional writers, and with everything there's one key thing to being talented and that's knowing when to break the rules. Breaking the rules when you know what you're doing can be amazing and produce awe-inspiring works, however breaking the rules because you're too ignorant to know they even exist certainly doesn't make you amazing and the only awe you'll inspire is stupidity.
The rules are very valuable, but any half-decent writer has already figured out the rules merely by reading.
> Btw, any piece about spelling contains at least one spelling error, yours is no exception ;)
I know! It's the irony of the world. No matter what, when you complain about a general lack of spelling there is always a spelling mistake, but you won't notice it until 5 hours later. It's like there's a frigging anti-spelling Nazi out there who hijacks your post just to screw with you.
God damn gremlins always plaguing English people :(
I constantly have the opposite problem -- for some reason freetards just luurve en_GB. If you really want superfluously coloured language, set your locale!
As someone mired in academia, I absolutely love that piece by Orwell. It's a good reminder that the writing I'm surrounded by isn't the type of writing I should emulate.
I keep a folder in my bookmarks of writing tips that I think are insightful. Here are a few:
Pullum points out how silly most of the book is in this article: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
A better respected book that wastes less time is Joseph William's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
A short review, with some excerpts: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/williams.h...