And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.

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PG posted an item yesterday titled, “Coordinating vs. Subordinating Conjunctions,” which triggered some comments that he appreciated, including one that asserted, “English punctuation is a mess.”

So PG was moved to hunt a bit in search of some excellent quotes about conjunctions for inclusion in today’s crop of blog posts.

His favorite conjunction quote is this one, which, as a bonus, also counsels the avoidance of “trendy locutions that sound flaky.”

Do not put statements in the negative form. And don’t start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

William Safire

PG is certain that visitors to The Passive Voice will warn him if he strays into unqualified superlatives and trendy locutions or fails to de-accesion euphisms and choose diminutive words in the future.

11 thoughts on “And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.”

  1. This shark snorts dubiously at the malign influence of MrsGrundyism on writing… especially for those of us who speak more than one language, and — just as English does for its vocabulary — borrow and as appropriate outright steal appropriate devices from other languages when they help us to make our points, such as building suspense (however needless, however frustrating, however subversive) by moving the verb to the end of the sentence where it belongs. Mr Twain entirely missed the charm of a language that avoids the ambiguity of multiword compound nouns by shoving the different parts together into one word, combined with whimsical partial verbalizations (“Gestapo” = “Geheimstaatspolizei”). Or perhaps not so whimsical as all that.

    Not to mention entering the the Bulwer-Lytton contest, and beginning paragraphs with fragments that have an inherited/implied subject; fragments that commit far, far graver offenses against MrsGrundyism than beginning with a mere conjunction; fragments and run-on sentences that, by themselves, evoke so much more than a merely dark and stormy night that they evolve from mere textbook-defying exercises to entire speeches that sink potential candidates for President, however much clearer they are than the typical legal description of a piece of property.

    But it could be worse: It could be legal writing.

  2. This is silly. You CAN’T start a sentence with a conjunction, because once you’ve capitalized a conjunction, it and the words that follow it comprise a sentence FRAGMENT. But that’s a good thing, because in fiction sometimes that’s exactly the right thing to do. Um, because That’s How People Speak.

    • Defining “sentence” is surprisingly tricky. Quirk, et al., “A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language” forthrightly punts the question. That being said, the definition you are using is not any sort of consensus, or even a strong minority opinion.

      • Sure, okay (shrug). I don’t recall having specified a definition, but since you’ve already dismissed it, I’ll offer one if only to give your dismissal sound footing. If a group of words makes sense on its own, without relying on any other utterances from the same or other sources, that is a sentence.

        A simple sentence can be as simple as a subject plus a verb (the direct object here is a bonus): She kicked the ball. If I begin that clause with a coordinating or subordinating conjunction, it is no longer a sentence but a sentence fragment because it no longer makes sense by itself, as in “And she kicked the ball” or “Before (after, because, since, believing, etc.) she kicked the ball.”

        Of course there are also complex sentences, compound sentences, and compound complex sentences. Sources. Hmmm. Because I was born about the time the last dinosaur was limping toward his grave, I’ve never heard of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, nor would I trust it if it “punts” the responsibility for defining a sentence. My own source for several years were various editions of the Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich (later HarBrace) College Handbook, which, I should add, has (or had) 19 pages of comma rules. All that when five simple rules would serve the same purpose.

        The only thing I’ve ever seen tricky about any of this is comparing what we (or at least I) think of as a “sentence” with what was called in olden times a “period sentence.”

    • SV[O] is a grammatical convention, but not a grammatical requirement so long as there is an SV, one of which may be implied. This is primarily because the actual unit of meaning in Indo-European languages is the paragraph, not the sentence: We readily inherit implied subjects, and sometimes implied predicates. This Mrs-Grundy-insulting paragraph is nontheless completely coherent and unambiguous if read as a paragraph:

      When I asked what had made the sticky mess in the refrigerator, my kid at first refused to answer. Finally, “Squirrel.”

      (A real-life exchange from a couple decades ago… with not one, but two implied predicates.)

      Too often, even in nonfiction, grammar mavens focus on the “correctness” of individual pixels and fail to look at the whole screen, or even just the part of the screen in focus. And the precatory conjunction is meaningless to grammatical correctness.

  3. And in any case, speech (usage) is the fundamental form.

    The consensus on formal writing style (which does evolve slowly in reaction to speech over time) is a marker of class status. Your ability to demonstrate “proper” usage is like achieving a college degree — it’s a marker of your ability to learn the rules. The rules per se are remarkably often disputable, since they imply an unchanging form while actual language (speech and it’s cousin, vernacular writing) is constantly moving along, often to one’s great delight.

    • Formal writing style is not about class status. It’s about error correction under circumstances where the writer is not available to respond to requests for clarification.

      A very great number of Internet flame wars happen because people foolishly believe they can write exactly the way they would speak. So they write ambiguously, their words are misinterpreted, and BOOM goes the dynamite.

      • I disagree.

        Formal writing enshrines a number of rules which are misanalyzed/mistaken (such as forbidding a preposition-ending sentence, or forbidding split infinitives). Those school-marm mannerisms are downright errors in understanding the English language (vs, say, Latin). And yet, they are enshrined with all the other rules that are supposed to advance clarity — that’s how you know that the rule-set is not primarily about clarity. It is artificial, and has all the virtues (clear rules) and defects (lack of congruence with changing usages, limited error correction) of all such constructs.

        It is a cultural filter in the form of a demonstrated mastery of rules, both useful (clarity) and arbitrary. It’s a class marker. The models are older language versions of written languages — thus do models of formal writing following the Latin masters remain influential as the languages of the people doing that become speakers of French, Catalan, Provencal, etc.

        And besides… most (all?) of the foundations of the national formal languages originate in the identification of the best authors in the language (as judged by educated people) and formalizing what their usage was. (Shakespeare, King James Bible, Cervantes, Dante, etc.) As a consequence, the definition of “the best” in formal language is not continuous, but punctuated in time as (first or) better “best authors” come to the fore. Each time, the rule books become modified. But those rule books are backward-looking (by definition), and lurch forward only when the (various dialects/usages of) vernacular actually make it into the hands of a sufficiently prominent “best author”.

        It’s author => rules => formal status, as a process. Certainly the clarity values enshrined in formal writing make it a very useful tool, and educated people show better or worse grasps on that when using it for formal discussion. On the other hand, the sources of “best usage” are not generally that class, but a class of “best authors” — not necessarily the same thing, though overlapping.

        All of this is a “good thing” since no living languages stand still, and we need individuals of craft and genius and a good ear to nudge the rule books along behind them. Of course, such individuals are not the general public who (as you say) writing as they speak produce such poor material. And so we sneer at them for not defaulting to the formal language and knowing their limits. (And if that’s not a class marker…?)

        • Very nice reply, K. As I’ve mentioned, both my mother and my sister were English teachers and they would appreciate your defense. Grammarly is just a partial substitute for such knowledge.

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