Because. And you know it’s right.
Huh? My good friend and Canadian chanteuse Donna Pepsicola Papacosta runs ‘Writing for Business’ courses in Canada and one of her most frequently asked questions is… well, I’ll let Donna explain:
Yesterday I led my business-writing workshop for a warm, smart group of entrepreneurial women here in Oakville. During a discussion about marketing copy, I showed them a sample sales letter. They nodded their heads at the attention-grabbing lead sentence, the problem, the solution, and so on, but one woman objected: “Wait, is this right? You’ve started a sentence with the word ‘and,’ Donna.”
And therein starts a great discussion about the ‘rules’ that we supposedly learnt at school about grammar an’ stuff.
Donna was taught the rules by Sister Grace at Most Precious Blood School (and no, she’s not making that up); another commenter to her post was taught by the nuns at Immaculate Conception.
Apart from marvelling at the creativity evident in the naming of Catholic schools run by nuns, it brought back memories of my own schooling at the by comparison boringly named St Ignatius College. Run by Jesuit priests (the high-octane intellectuals of the Catholic system – it’s a pity their brilliance didn’t transfer over to me, hey?!), we only had visiting nuns, primarily from Kildare College (see? another dull name; what is it with the Australian Catholic education system?).
Sister Mary Hairy-Legs was the only nun I can remember but I do have a vague recollection of others wandering the quadrangle, and Sister Mary certainly never taught us grammer (as far as I remember – it WAS a loooong time ago!).
My Sunday Times Wordpower Guide says, on the subject of starting sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But’:
One of the more persistent grammatical superstitions is that you can’t begin a sentence with And. This is curious, because many of the best writers in the English language — Shakespeare, Blake, Tennyson, Kipling, to name just four — have kicked sentences off with And, and so has the Bible: read the opening chapter.
The same applies to But:
There is no rule to say that you can’t begin a sentence or a paragraph with the conjunction but. When you want to express a doubt or outright disagreement to a statement, starting with But can emphasise and dramatise your point. But don’t let it become a habit!
The author of the book then goes on to prove his point by recalling a memorable sentence in one of the UK’s major daily newspapers, the Daily Express, that not only began with but, but ended with but; and the following sentence began with and:
‘Northumberland and Humberside will each hold the trophy for six months after fighting out an exciting 1-1 draw. But if the result was indecisive, then the Soccer was anything but. And when all the medals have been engraved…’
And if that’s not a good enough example, I don’t know what is.
