Not to put too fine a point on it ...

At Blogspot, Bill Walsh has a lesson on when to throw the stylebook out the window and let reason be your guide.

We are editors, yes, but we must be writers as well. And sometimes a stylebook ruling or a factual correction conflicts with the goal of presenting prose that sounds as if maybe, just maybe, it was written by a human rather than a machine.

He includes three examples with the original copy, the catch, the rimmer's fix, the slot's problem with the fix, a better solution and final thoughts.