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“No hanging prepositions!”: how descriptive is English instruction?

Basically the question came up with some friends of mine as to what degree people actually write “correctly” in Standard English. Do people use hanging prepositions in American writing? Specifically, we know from a descriptive standpoint that all Standard American English (SAE) speakers use hanging prepositions—it is simply a fact about the way people speak, it has nothing to do with how they “should” speak.

So, off to the corpus data. Specifically, I ran some initial queries through the The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) on the preposition “with”.

So, this is really precursory, for a few reasons:

1. “With” may exhibit an aberrant pattern compared to the general population of prepositions
2. Many different contextual sources for “written material” was included.
3. The query syntax lacks a certain finness…it is rather likely that some “correctly” formed constructions are false positives of instances in which it is impossible to place the preposition at the end of a sentence/phrase in English (and vice versa, “Do you want to come with?” has no real correct alternative). Also, the query for correctly formed types was a bit of a hack, with every form I could think of simply being listed.
4. Most importantly, I interpreted the definition of hanging prepositions as at the end of a full phrase, not a sentence (thus the “with ,”, etc., queries). I think this is grammatically justified, but who knows?
5. Finally, I would like a list of collacates to go with the trends to see if there are  contextual reasons people form the construction as hanging or correctly

Here is the list of queries, and results:

         Written   Spoken
        --------   ------
"with ."     8747     5057
"with ?"     1037     1027
"with ,"     8009     4478
"with :"     791      50
"with ;"     197      38

sum        18781    10650

correct-
forms      19681    5174  {"with which|whom|who|what"}

ratio      0.95     2.06
of incorrect
to correct

So we see that in spoken SAE we find that hanging prepositions occur 2.06 times as often as correctly formed ones. In writing however, they are equally (~0.95) as likely to occur. Therefore,

1. Yes, people use hanging prepositions in in spoken language more than correctly formed prepositional constructions, at least for “with”—about twice as much for “with”.
2. Written language is either 1) influenced by prescriptive rules, and people use the “correct form” more or 2) people use the “correct form” more for other intralingual reasons.

Definitive, no. But it definitely has reshaped the way I think about how influential prescriptive rules may be in SAE.