how about a summary of what you've got out of this so far, if anything

Sure.

1. Not splitting infinitives.
2. Not ending sentences with a preposition.
3. Not starting a sentence with a conjunction.
4. Not using they as a singular non-gender-specific pronoun.
5. Eschewing the passive voice.
6. Eschewing tautology or redundancy.
7a. Not verbing nouns.
7b. Not nouning verbs.
8. Not using decimate with the sense of destroy.
9. Not using none or all of with the plural form of verbs.
10. The that-which rule.
11. Not using modifiers with unique.

They fall into a couple of broad categories:

a. Usage preferences mis-categorized as grammatical rules.
b. Eschewing polysemy in lexical items.

[Added some I forgot about earlier.]

Last edited by zmjezhd; 09/05/09 02:58 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.