I've been mulling over an article in The Chronicle Review suggesting that Strunk and White's Elements of Style is overrated.  Mr. Pullum, the author, makes some convincing arguments.  Among other things, he disagrees with their denigration of the passive voice and gives reasonable recommendations for its usage.  Then he points to an error that surprised me:

[The] bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.

He quotes the three mistaken diagnoses, and he's clearly correct (one example: "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground").  It's been a long time since I read Elements, but I think I understood enough grammar by then to know that those sentences aren't passive.  I'll have to pick up another copy of it and see if I still get the same positive impression I had ten years ago.