You Can Start a Sentence With “and”, “but” or “or”
Growing up, English teachers hammered into our developing brains as writers a specific rule: don’t start a sentence with a union.
This, my friends, is not true.
If you need to brush up on your grammar a little, conjunction is a word that connects phrases or sentences. And, but and or are the three most common, but there are seven conjunctions in English that you can memorize with the FANBOYS acronym:
F or A nd N or B ut O r Y et S o
You can cram any of them right at the beginning of the sentence. It’s okay now, and it was good as long as people were writing. Have you ever read the Bible?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the land was formless and empty; and darkness was on the face of the abyss. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the water. And God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
Plus, Grammar Girl – which I trust unconditionally – says that virtually all modern grammar textbooks and style guides agree that this is okay. For example, this is stated in the Chicago style guide :
There is a widespread belief, with no historical or grammatical basis, that it is wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but or so . In fact, a significant percentage (often up to 10 percent) of top-notch writing offers start with conjunctions. This has been the case for centuries, and even the most conservative grammars have followed this practice.
Perhaps at some point it seemed that the practice of initiating join-sentence was out of control, and teachers felt that they should completely ban the practice. Abstinence versus moderation, if you will.
It was an overreaction and we all suffered because of it.
However, what should you not do? Don’t go crazy by dropping the commas after these conjunctions when you use them at the beginning of a sentence. But maybe you really feel like it’s worth going there. And you are wrong.
The exception, in my opinion, is the word “so”. I like it when I start a sentence with “so”, when I start a sentence with a comma. And this guy from Just Publishing Advice agrees with me:
For me, the word so at the beginning of a sentence is a union adverb, for example, therefore . So, I would use a comma in both cases.
So I missed the train at 5:26 pm and then at 5:55 pm but eventually got to the 18:25 train.
So I was there, got up, and the second time I was broke.
But for the other six unions, the comma is usually not used.
However, Lifehacker associate editor Alice Bradley disagrees with me and this guy; she is very anti-comma.
So I’m just going to omit that little sentence – with a comma! – to see what she does.