Photo by Max Anderson on Unsplash
You wouldn’t believe the number of times people tell me I shouldn’t start sentences with ‘and’. And you can add ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘for’, and ‘while’ to the list of seemingly offensive words that shouldn’t be used as openers. I am not sure where this particular style guideline comes from, but my research seems to suggest that the construct is frowned upon because of its inelegance.
Now I grew up in the seventies. And at the beginning of every school week, we’d spend a couple of hours writing about our weekends. Woe betide any child who began a sentence with ‘and’, for they would endure the wrath of teacher’s red pen and the embarrassment of public humiliation. Personally, I believe it was this practice of news writing that is to blame for the ‘and’ rule. I believe it was post-war schoolteachers who made up this rule to protect themselves from the utter tediousness of childhood prose — endless strings of sentences that start with “and then I went to…”.
During the half-century that’s passed since the flower power era, our lives have changed dramatically and so has our language. I wonder what my primary school teacher would have made of words like flexitarian, emoji, upcycling, or — one of my personal favorites – booyah.
Avoiding repetition and creating rhythm are two of your best friends when it comes to writing — because they prevent your text from becoming monotonous (and your reader from wanting to stick pins in their eyes). A balance of long and short sentences will help to create rhythm. Awareness of the words you tend to repeat will help your text from the doldrums. My particular minefield is the word ‘enable’. I don’t think I’ve ever written a piece without it. In fairness, I work with enabling technologies, so it fits. But I balk every time I see it.
And it’s the same with starting sentences (like this one) with ‘the dreaded and’. Used sparingly, this construct can be great for creating rhythm. But if you start every sentence with the same word — no matter what that word might be — your text will be dull.
Here’s an example from E.M. Forster’s A passage to India, by my favorite language guru Benjamin Dreyer:
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him, but the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him. But the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
I think it’s clear that the second version is preferable because the rhythm makes the reader focus on the sad bit about the Major not pitching up — and it’s the one that Forster chose.
Tip
Go ahead, break your text free from the shackles of post-war idiocy, but do it deliberately and conscientiously to avoid copy that is boring and monotonous.
dpdoyle 