<blockquote>With a mixture of careful argument and finely tuned derision, he debunks a lot of creaky old hokum about the heinousness of splitting an infinitive and why you should write "Karen is smarter than I" rather than "Karen is smarter than me". Yet he is hardly a member of the "Anything goes" school, and he lays down plenty of prescriptions about both the general character of well-wrought prose and its minutiae.</blockquote>