Quote Originally Posted by Scapegrace View Post
Did you idiots miss the part where I said that its not grammatically incorrect and that one should only avoid it in academic writing? God job Jim. You spent half an hour writing something that agrees with what I took three seconds to write. You look super fucking smart.

This raving intelligence is helped by the fact that you apparently can't read and that you had to look up the most well-respect guide to writing in the English language.
People with PhDs in all manner of fields, including English, frequently begin sentences with conjunctions in their academic prose. Mr. Strunk and Mr. White's little treatise could be called outmoded, but more to the point, its usefulness and accuracy were questionable from the outset. A good discussion of Elements of Style's problematic content can be found here.

A somewhat better but less heralded dead-white-guy-talking-about-English-usage-and-grammar book is Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins.

If this were an actual debate or even a discussion, it would boil down to prescriptivist versus descriptivist takes on grammar. (Strunk and White tried, clumsily, to be prescriptivist. Bernstein was descriptivist.) But the citation of a third-grade teacher's admonishment, backed up by a book whose popularity fails to equal intelligence and accuracy, doesn't rise to the level of debate or discussion. It's mere Internet silliness.