The Return To Innocence

That was a great article. I have never read Elements of Style, but, like everyone in academia, I lived in its shadow while in grad school. I remember papers marked with red for violating some of Strunk's rules (do not start a sentence with "however", etc). At the time I was surprised because none of these seemed to be incorrect to me based on my past experience. In retrospect, it seems that the biology department professors had absorbed these capricious and often incorrect rules and stuck to them. Then I took a science writing course. I was overwhelmed at first because I thought I could go with what I knew about writing. That turned out to be a bit of a shock. The teacher was an absolute Elements of Style Nazi who presumably dreamed in proofreading marks (if you didn't use the correct mark then even a correct mark while editing a piece would get you in trouble).