I got a lot of benefit from Strunk & White.
I agree with this, from Robb’s link:
I find Joseph Williams’s Style quite a bit more helpful, explanatory, and modern. Gower’s “Plain Words” is useful to help point out a lot of pitfalls, especially for non-writers who have to write for their jobs, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite follow its own recommendations terribly well.
If xkcd wrote an illustrated book on style, that would be the winner.
And that characterization would give more credit than is due. What they actually say is this:
[QUOTE=Strunk and White]
This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.
The dramatists of the Restoration are little esteemed today.
Modern readers have little esteem for the dramatists of the Restoration.
The first would be the preferred form in a paragraph on the dramatists of the Restoration; the second, in a paragraph on the tastes of modern readers. The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often, as in these examples, determine which voice is to be used.
[/quote]
That’s it. Nothing else.
Two sentences contextualized only by vague explanations, without any attention to the actual surrounding language. In fact, this is how just about all of the book justifies its axioms: lone, decontextualized sentences, no doubt simply made up by the authors. It’s not that these axioms are wrong. Most of it is simply formal usage rules that you can find anywhere. The rest, however—where the book seems to claim its identity—is more of a smug, self-congratulatory parade, as though the points they make were universal and mechanically self-evident (when in fact they derived from historically situated preferences), and that if only the reader would have the good sense to adopt their self-appointed wisdom he or she would instantly become a “good” writer.
Such grandstanding doesn’t make for good writing instruction, because it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything. Those who can “get” Strunk and White are those who have already internalized it by other means anyway—essentially by reading a lot of literature which comes from the same stylistic tradition. Developing writers can’t possess an innate perception of “breezy manner,” or “awkward adverbs,” or most of the other neat little tropes they trot out as though there were part of some kind of natural order, rather than parameters of socialization to a of particular kind of writing. Probably the most self-congratulatory of all is their exhortation to “be clear,” as though the developing writer were for some reason deliberately trying not to be clear. In fact, the pathway to clarity is not by way of pretty conceits such as those Strunk and White offer (or the barely more helpful suggestion to break one sentence into two), but by engaging in dialog with the developing writer regarding the particular content of the text in question.
This is the messy, cognitive reality of writing pedagogy—and not what Strunk and White are interested in. Their book is appealing to those who already can do it; it’s a kind of self-slapping on the back. While obviously there’s no way to prove it, I assert that that those who credit it for their own development as writers had actually already culled their awareness of the book’s points from extensive, motivated reading.