– The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive

and they then give a particularly unrealistic example of the passive which nobody would ever utter:

- My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that some, like the National Parks Service, have misunderstood their intent. (http://www.nps.gov/crmo/forteachers/activity-3d.htm)

There are only two voices, so if you say ‘Use the active voice’, what on earth else could you be comparing it with other than the passive?

I particularly like your observation that: “Someone who takes the authors’ advice too literally will always write fortissimo, without any understanding of the uses and virtues of the pianissimo. Irony, impartiality, subtlety, and negation do have a place in good writing.”

To The Elements of Style, which I discovered only in my late twenties, I owe 90% of what little formal grammatical training I’ve ever acquired. (Naturally hip Australian public schools in the 1960s and 1970s weren’t going to frustrate anyone’s “creativity” by offering such training.) So my debt to the book is considerable.

And yet I do jib, not only at the factors Dan cites, but at another instruction in it, which Dan doesn’t mention: the command to avoid all foreign terms whatsoever. Sometimes, at the risk of seeming “elitist”, “fascist”, etc., etc., one simply must use a foreign phrase, to convey one’s meaning. Imagine going through life attempting to discover concise English-language synonyms for raison d’être, or mutatis mutandis, or de facto, or ad hoc, or half-a-dozen other imports.