An interesting take but I'm not convinced based on the strength of that article. There are several places where those laws are based on good principles but IMHO misleading. Eg never any place for Automatically Update styles (TOC styles?); never use format painter (even to apply a paragraph style?)

Their reasoning for avoiding Normal style is completely without basis. A definition for 'Normal' is conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected so it sounds like an apt style name for the most commonly used paragraph formatting. Body Text works too but it doesn't have the sole claim for this purpose.

Again, I go back to the default templates from Microsoft - since they chose Normal, the preponderance of content you will encounter is going to be based on Normal. Plus just about every style is based on Normal in those templates so the beauty (and horror) of cascading style attributes is already aligned with Normal as your starting style.

At least you gave a more meaningful reason related to table styles (which didn't exist when that guy wrote his blog article).

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia