http://m.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c60799c-24e2-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html
Interesting article. Though I am still for Strunk and White, despite the fact that the line about "nutritious writing" made a lot of sense.

Interesting food for thought!

What is the knock-on effect?

Indirect or secondary effect? possibly unforeseen?

Geoff Kloske........ says, “More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.”

I'm guilty.

Knock on effect is like the dominoe effect...you do one thing, that thing leads to another, which leads to another and so on...

Strunk and White

The problem with The Elements of Style is that people who worship it have turned it into the inviolable laws of writing. Geoff Pullum and others over at the Language Log blog (link) has written many entries on Strunk and White, and his conclusion is that it does more harm than good. My favorite bit of statistics is that White in his own writings totally ignores the that-which restrictive non-restrictive clause rule. Then there are the death to adjectives people one mets online and in style guides. They have misinterpreted the whole write concisely style suggestion as some kind of adjectival-adverbial zero-tolerance exceptionless law. This probably strikes a sympathetic chord with the need many have of finding a single word for some thing rather than using a phrase. And finally we have blaming it the Internet, which in the '50s was blame it on TV, and before that who knows what. The language is never in a state of perfection, for it is always in a state of fall and disintegration. The Cassandras who think this way always hearken back to the halcyon days when grammar was beaten into students with a wooden ruler and small style guides masquerading as books of grammar.

Wow, do I remember the days when Grammar was beaten into
my head: good old Sister Mary Georgia.

I agree. It comes back to "too much of anything good is bad".

In junior high I finally managed to convince my English teacher that I understood grammar just fine, it was the rules for diagramming sentences that had me baffled. He stopped making me do it.

Memory of those horrid grammar text books in elementary
school. And then being assigned 3 pages of work for home.
Took well over an hour of "home" time. As a Freshman sitting
at my desk in English class, paying little attention, the
prof mentioned looking at his grade book for a moment, and
he would announce the top "scholar" in the class. And it was
me. I almost burst milk thru my nose had I been drinking milk. From that time I've enjoyed it somewhat, but never to
the extent that it made all those hours worthwhile. I mean
who wants to be top in the class in English at age 15?

I was never at the top of my class - ever. It baffled me. I felt I should be, but I never was. Not once.

I was never at the top of my class - ever. It baffled me. I felt I should be, but I never was. Not once.
I suspect, m'dear, that you may be like my son: brilliant but too much in tune with his own drummer to satisfy the grading/marking requirements.

Praps. In the Maths paper, there was a 'rough column' you had to draw on the right side of the answer sheet. In it you had to do your "rough work" or how you worked out the sum. That column terrified me. I liked to multiply numbers from left to right. The teachers wanted right to left. I never quite understood it.

It was my only time- 9th grade - and it never happened
again, which, I suppose is why I was messing around
at my desk, paying little attention, and it so surprised
me.

Later in life when I learned my IQ, I was astounded. I hated
school, despised homework and tests and especially hated
term papers in high school, college, etc. My thesis was
a joke, from my point of view, so I may be like your son
marching to my own drummer. Yet I love learning, as on
this site, so many things to absorb, but school was
Yeaaach! Never did figure out why I went into education
as a teacher.

To get your own back maybe? My aunt insists that that is the reason she became a teacher...teachers gave her hell so she is returning the favour (she was also told that she couldn't sing or play the piano, yet she teaches both and was training to be an opera singer before she caught a terrible throat problem that doesn't let her sing for long until her voice gives out...)

To get my own back? Maybe so, good thought, thanks.
And to show kids that not all teachers are despised.
I'm sure many disliked me, but I know I made it
interesting, and they seldom left without a smile
on their faces.