I think I'm just going to recommend this book as a reference http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0877796335 and this one for fun http://www.amazon.com/Madding-Gerund-Other-Dispatches-Language/dp/1590280555/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246307808&sr=1-1. I'll be quiet now!

I do some corrections here on the forum, mostly things like monotonous functions and disjunct sets from non-native English speakers. I also occasionally entirely rewrite poorly organized arguments; that's where the thorny issues tend to come from in mathematical writing. My most common change of that type is to turn a proof by contradiction into a proof by contrapositive.

McWhorter's Teaching Company lectures give a fascinating perspective on this (to a layman like me at least). Only written languages have this obsession with these rules, and there are only about 200 written language out of the 6,000+ today.

Apparently, English developed many of its rules in a somewhat arbitrary fashion 300 years ago when two men decided that if England was going to be a world power it needed a language as rules based (i.e., dead as) Latin or Greek.

http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600

Are you sure? A potential counterexample could be the grammatical tradition in ancient India, which was triggered by the need to recite texts properly.

Osud, I definitely will defer to you on linguistics! What I remember from the lectures is that many languages (without the artificial effort of writing or intense memorization) are very fluid between dialects and over time. I find linguistics fascinating but claim no expertise.

The worship of made-up rules, at the expense of developing a good ear for what sounds right and a good feel for what scans, is an enormous waste.

The only plausible argument for it is that many people just can't develop the ear/feel, so better to at least give them some rules that might keep them from sounding like boobs. But you know what? Rules or not, they're going to sound like boobs anyway. That is one thing to which I am prepared forcefully to testify.

If you haven't read this, it's a beautiful takedown and summary of all that's wrong with strunkwhiteism:

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm

Sandor, if you like that, you should read more of Geoff Pullum's quality work on Strunk and White at Language Log-- http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1336 That also includes a link to Geoff's interview on NPR. He's a lot more colorful on Language Log; one post is titled "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18."

I think most of the "errors" described in that article are too obscure for most eighth-grade English classes, with the possible exception of judgement/judgment and split infinitives, and I think my middle school English teachers were aware of those points.

From my experience in the online classroom, I think that it's more important to teach people not to use pronouns without antecedents than to teach them subject-verb agreement.

I wish to defend Strunk and White from that article, by the way. I think that "Omit needless words" is profound advice. I think that "An anonymous benefactor paid the bill" sounds much better than "The bill was paid for by an anonymous benefactor." In my opinion, the second sentence is pretentious and difficult to understand, compared to the first one. I think that the faults that the article lists are not problems with the book itself, but from too-strict adherence to the rules in the book. True, some of the specific rules are outdated, but if you take the rules as advice, rather than sacred mandates, the book has some of the most valuable writing advice that I have ever seen. White himself acknowledged the flexibility of rules in his introduction to the 1979 edition :
The Elements of Style changed the way I thought about communication. After I read it, I tried harder to write clear sentences. It isn't perfect, but it's the best book of its kind that I have encountered.

Sure, the worship of made-up rules is a bad thing, but I have never personally encountered an English teacher who did worship made-up rules. I think I smell a bit of straw man argument.