Itchy Bitesized 28: Starting a sentence with But or And

Why you're told you shouldn't, and why quite often you should.

Itchy Bitesized is a series of short posts about all sorts of writing issues, from inspiration and process to craft, technique and the realities of the writing life. Click here for the full list.

I recently got involved in a social media discussion with a very senior agent, who was editing a proposal and being irritated by how the highly-educated author of a fascinating project loved starting sentences with ‘but’, and occasionally with ‘and’. Had they become standard English now, the editor asked, perhaps rhetorically: in his schooldays, his teachers would have corrected every single one.

Tongue only a little in my cheek, I responded first with this sentence -

But for the gap between how the logic of grammar is taught so as to enable good communication, and the reality of how people actually think and talk, we wouldn't find ourselves having these discussions.

- which is entirely correct under even the most traditional of grammar rules. If you don’t believe me, just try rearranging its units and you’ll see that it’s a perfectly proper sentence: ‘We wouldn’t find ourselves having these discussions, but for the gap between how the logic of grammar is taught so as to enable good communication, and the reality of how people actually think and talk.’

Then I continued -

And I don’t know how much it matters.

- which is the kind of incorrect usuage that the agent was noticing, as is this:

But there’s a gap between the logic of grammar and the reality of how people think and talk.

These are incorrect because formal grammar prescribes that ‘and’ or ‘but’, being ‘coordinating conjunctions’, needs to be joining two, grammatically similar parts of the same sentence. Cambridge Dictionary on conjunctions is nice and clear about this, with good examples such as these:

The meal was very expensive and not very nice.

There are seats outside but some people don’t like sitting outdoors.

If you imagine putting a full stop between the two elements which are being linked (‘and’) or contrasted (‘but’), you can see that it disjoins what ought to be joined - and the second sentence then starts with that broken joint.

But as David Crystal says, there is always a tension between how we use grammar and punctuation to convey meaning, and how we use it to convey how people actually speak, and therefore write, what they mean.

So I kicked off the sentence which you’ve just read with a ‘but’ for two reasons:

1. I wanted to make quite a substantial point, which would be too long if it were added to the previous sentence.

2. Reading it aloud* made it clear that the ‘but’ needed some force to it. The point I was making is a clear argument in the opposite direction to the previous point about not breaking the joint - and I darned well want the sentence to kick off with some oppositional oomph.

In other words, starting a sentence with a conjunction does break a rule which has a logical reason for existing - but it may evoke the form and structure of the writer's thought better than a more formally correct way of writing the same thing.

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* I didn’t actually read it aloud. But as an ex-wannabe-actor, I’ve been speaking written words aloud for a great many years, so my ears heard how my thought would have sounded aloud and my typing fingers reproduced that. This occasionally has the disconcerting effect that if I’m really in the (hearing) zone while writing - in all other ways a Very Good Thing - my spelling becomes very phonetic.

Image credit: Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash