Summary: Strunk and White are grammatical incompetents.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Pullum
knows what he is talking about.
"What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. 'At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard' is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
"* 'There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground' has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
"* 'It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had' also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
"* 'The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired' is presumably fingered as passive because of 'impaired,' but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. 'Become' doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that 'A new edition became issued by the publishers' is not grammatical.)"
I agree with Pullum that one of the big problems of Strunk and White as a guide to writing is its nearly complete ignorance of discourse structure or any other level of analysis beyond looking at single sentences.
This is particularly common in people with academic background, as the passive voice is often encouraged in scientific writing.
It explains things that have bugged me for years. Where did I get these vague ideas about split infinitives, beginning sentences with "However", and "which" vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down versions of Strunk and White, who turn out to have been just plain wrong.
My sense of my own native language just got clearer.
Edit: it's possible that the harm was done more by over-rigid promulgation of S&W's rules than by S&W itself, but I still think that Pullum's phrase "unhappy state of grammatical angst" hits the nail on the head.
Actually, many of those bugaboos of English teachers in schools long precede the publication of Strunk's book as edited by White. Strunk would have learned his hang-ups from teachers who mindlessly passed on hang-ups they learned from still earlier teachers.
Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.
The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.
Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.