Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I'd like to get as irritated as you (rather, I'd like to get things right and not irritate my readers), but my English education was terrible. Where can I learn the real rules?
Well, for my own history, getting assigned Strunk and White when I first got to Caltech was a good start, though I agree with the critics as to its tendency to being out of date, some clear hypercorrection in its linguistic prescriptivism, and the more style-oriented parts being not great outside of the formal academic context. From there, it's mostly just been reading lots and lots of linguistics papers.
I also know that several of my peers in high school learned several important bits of English grammar — including, for a few of them, the basic parts of speech — from taking Spanish class.
So the key, really, is to find things that, for one or another element of grammar, lay out something like 'this is how English does this versus how other languages do it.' Like that we use attributive nouns like every other Germanic language (and unlike the Romance languages), but are rather unique in mostly keeping spaces between the nouns: like "motor vehicle liability insurance" versus German * Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung*. Or else, those that cover historical evolution of the language: 'this is how Modern English does this versus how Middle English did it.'
Actually, some of the more introductory articles on Wikipedia for various grammatical categories aren't too terrible as a starting place, particularly for things like tense-aspect-mood and phrasal verbs (which is why you sometimes can end a sentence with a preposition, and "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put" is an incorrect hypercorrection).
As for the rule of dialogue, there's any number of places to find it pointed out that the actual rule is against having two or more different people speaking in the same paragraph, not that there must be a paragraph break at the start of each sentence where a different person speaks — or worse, at the start of each quotation even mid-sentence. (This last is why I mostly avoid reading webfiction.)
(And the vocative comma shouldn't go away, because it's the difference between "let's eat, Grandma," and "let's eat Grandma.")
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