Reddit reviews Oxford Guide to Plain English (Oxford Paperback Reference)
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Oxford University Press UK
> How about more than 2 sentences?
So 3+ sentences for 500+ questions = 1500+ sentences.
According to the Oxford Guide To Plain English you should "make the average sentence length 15-20 words.” Let's assume we Mr. Brimage isn't going to be so formal and reduce that number to 10 words per sentence.
10 words over 1500+ sentences is 15,000 words.
I bet if you wrote a convincing 15,000+ word response as to why Mr. Briamge should write longer responses in his AMA you could convince him to do so.
I agree with you in general and it's a good point: of course people can and should make up their own minds.
Still, the OP was looking for some sort of 'definitive' guide to start off with. I was just suggesting the EofS probably isn't that guide, partly because it's so prescriptive, which is a problem if it's also often wrong. It's no good saying "here's what a split infinitive looks like: don't use them", if good writers have been splitting infinitives for hundreds of years. It's a personal prejudice elevated to a diktat, and I'm not sure that's good for a student who wants to understand grammar or style.
As mentioned by another poster, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar by Huddleston and Pullen is good (if long) — it's a descriptive grammar, but it does a good job of describing good usage and it's probably a better foundational guide to prepare people to be able to take the good out of books like EofS, while disregarding the bad.
A Student's Introduction is quite expensive, though. The Oxford Guide to plain English (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Guide-English-Paperback-Reference/dp/0199669171/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2/257-8116461-2798740?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0199669171&pd_rd_r=6ce92ef0-fc45-445e-adec-8f2560d61755&pd_rd_w=NIW0h&pd_rd_wg=Jqqn6&pf_rd_p=7a9d3b22-47b7-4932-be38-57f4219c3325&pf_rd_r=AYTAYM68196T1BE8KHB3&psc=1&refRID=AYTAYM68196T1BE8KHB3) is a lot shorter and cheaper. I've not read it myself, but a quick scan through suggests it's fairly sensible and useful. E.g. there's a section on "Six Writing Myths" which looks like it provides good advice. It's from the same stable as the Oxford English Dictionary, so it's likely to be fairly authoritative.