Pullum should know, of course: he’s the author of this big fat book, which having read this essay I’d gladly assign to my intro students in place of Strunk & White if not for the fact that it costs over $160 and runs to nearly 2,000 pages long. (Anyone have some alternative suggestions?) It’s hard, though, not to feel like his criticism sometimes goes a bit beyond its proper bounds, as for example when he seems to blame MS Word’s nasty habit of underlining EVERY SINGLE PASSIVE-VOICE CONSTRUCTION in one of those bothersome green lines on our national love-affair with the Elements (“That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.”); this may be accurate for all I know, but I’d need to see a bit more evidence.