Context is everything.
But there are no rules in style. Merely dozens of often contradictory conventions.
I agree with that in principal but not in universal practice. Whether a particular style is convention or religion is a matter of personal circumstance. We can take it as read that you can always have one more ah yes, but that isn’t a rule so much as a convention until we’re arguing about hypothetical proto-indo-european words. 
The whole reason we have style guides is because even the “rules” in English are a contradictory mess. The various guides are about consistency and clarity: just a collection of winding paths through the same otherwise impenetrable jungle.
Yes, of course, an accomplished writer will develop their own style and voice over time. But most people aren’t going to learn to blaze their own trails without walking on the paths set down by others.
I mostly usually* agree with this. I’m a strong advocate of aids like Strunk and White, even though the cognoscenti like to dump on that particular example today.
From what I see, teaching style has not advanced since I was in high school. Teachers have no time to teach nuances, so they teach rules. Yet these “rules” have two contradictory failings. One, they are not all-encompassing, so they can be applied wrongly. Two, people insist on others applying the rule to cases where it does not fit.
Hardly anyone other than professionals will consult with an 700-page Chicago Manual of Style. Even pros soon learn that’s what the copyeditors, those poor saps, are for.**
Context is still everything. A few years ago people practically had apoplexy at the use of “u” for you in texting. Today you’d get insulted as a boomer if you didn’t do that. The context of a message board is different from the context of a newspaper. We have hundreds of posters and the polite fiction is that each of them should be considered equal to all the others no matter what rules they follow or never have heard of. In practice this mostly usually works. Only a few outliers and posters in threads about language and style get their adherence parsed. That’s as it should be.
* I usually agree with this most of the way and I mostly agree with this in usual circumstances. Dual adverbs ain’t pretty but they sometimes serve. What’s the rule?
** Gratuitous brag. On my last book the copyeditor told me that my prose was so engrossing he kept forgetting to do his job. Then he said it happens about 20% of the time, which somewhat reduced the glory.
I got an email newsletter from the New Yorker yesterday. The subject line was
“The Cat and the Hat” ’s Cold War Connection"
(Quotation marks are theirs, not mine)
If you’re a proponent of the little book, you and I can never be enemies.
This makes my eyes twitch.
From The New Yorker! Proud possessor of the world’s most idiotic idiosyncratic style guide.
To be fair, headlines/headings/heds are somewhat of a special case when it comes to style. I’d consider subject lines to be in the same general category.
But that example still gives me a shiver.
It seems to be missing a quotation mark, too. (And there’s also an opening double quote, a closing double quote, and a vertical double quote there, though I assume that’s auto-formatting from the cut-and-paste into Discourse.)
Idk where that final quote mark came from. I didn’t manually add it. I already permanently deleted the email so I can’t check if I dropped a quote mark somewhere.
The main thing is where it put the single quote mark - a space after the double quote mark, then the single quote mark. Like what BigT posted.
That would be the logical place if you’re adhering to style rules, I guess. Ugly as hell, but at least logical.
You’re not kidding! They really like holding on to tradition.