I know you probably mean it as a compliment to K&R, but you shouldn't compare K&R with S&W: while both are opinionated, the advice in K&R is coherent and sensib

I know you probably mean it as a compliment to K&R, but you shouldn't compare K&R with S&W: while both are opinionated, the advice in K&R is coherent and sensible! S&W is a bizarre book: it's a pleasure to read because the authors are both excellent writers, but they don't know anything about grammar so their advice often makes no sense. Seriously, read it again (it's a short book) and count how many times they actually follow their own grammatical advice (their advice not about a technical grammar point is usually sound, and you should, for example, omit needless words). My opinion is that you should take S&W as style exemplar, but not a style guide. Geoffrey Pullum's article 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice explains all this better than I can: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf