Here's some pretty strong thoughts on the matter: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-

Here's some pretty strong thoughts on the matter: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... ‘So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.’ Might be a decent guide for the utter beginner, but if you're trying to learn to write with style, rather than simply to write comprehensibly, it's more important to know all of the many, many times you can and probably should break the rules in The Elements of Style.