Let’s out those false gods of grammar.
Why is it everyone can remember what they needn’t—never start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’, never ever start one with ‘because’; never use a comma before an ‘and’; never end a sentence with a preposition; never split an infinitive? My theory? They’re easy to spot. Most of them occur at the start or the finish of a sentence. So it’s easier to police these few easy shouldn’ts than to teach a young writer the thousand ways to make a sentence right.
Moreover, each of these so-called rules, painfully remembered by so many adults, is, if not an outright error, merely a nicety—a piece of fashionable usage—mistaken for a rule. Grammar isn’t interested in the kind of manners you can enforce with a red pen or a ruler on the knuckles. It is a deeper kind of lore.
So here’s how these ‘rules’ stand (and always did).
1 You may start any sentence you like with an ‘and’ or a ‘but’.Check your Bible sometime. It’s harder to find a sentence that doesn’t start with a conjunction, especially in those early Old Testament books, than to find one that does. Check out Virginia Woolf. A
Room of One’s Owneven begins with ‘But’. Look at any accom- plished writing—novels, poems, essays, reportage, reports, textbooks—and you’ll find more initial conjunctions than you can poke a stick at.
The grammar of it goes like this, I guess: conjunctions may be used to join together words or phrases or clauses; since a sentence is just a clause (or a number of clauses) conjunctions may join them together.
The real rule is don’t overdo it. Like anything. Starting a sentence with a conjunction is unexpected, and therefore striking. If you do it in every other sentence it loses its punch. Or you begin to write it like a poem or a liturgy: this is how it works in the Bible.
2 You may start a sentence with ‘because’.If ‘because’ is the first word in an introductory phrase or clause, it belongs there perfectly well—as long as there’s a main clause following after. Here are some good sentences that start with ‘because’:
Because her book was so unlike anything else, she had trouble finding a publisher.
Because of all this rain, we’ve had to call off the game.
Because this is a complex sentence, I can start it with ‘because’ if I want to.
Don’t feel obliged to write something awkward or excessive like ‘due to’ or ‘due to the fact that’,‘as a consequence of’ or ‘as’ instead, or to turn the sentence around. It’s fine to start a sentence with ‘because’, as long as it’s a good sentence. Why were we ever told otherwise? When mum asks you why you’re playing with the cricket ball in the house again, you may have responded ‘Because!’ or ‘Because I want to!’, each of which is a sentence fragment—not to mention rude.
3 You may end a sentence with a preposition. ‘A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.’ So we were all once told. It can still feel clumsy to place the preposition, where we frequently place it in speech, at the end of the sentence, detached from the word it really belongs in front of (oops!). But English word order is loose and generous. It allows you to delay a preposition in this way, often when you’re forming up a question or a periodic sentence (one ending with a subordinate clause), as in ‘Whom should I give the book to?’ or as in the sentence I put at the start—or just because, as in my third sentence, a verb–preposition combination comes at the very end. All the style guides these days say just forget it; end your sentence with a preposition if that’s the way you do it in speech. If you want to tidy the sentence up, shift the preposition, but watch you don’t end up with something like this: ‘Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not put.’ (That was Churchill’s sarcastic reply to a pedant who wrote to tell him he’d put a preposition at the end of a sentence in a speech.) 4 You may split your infinitives. Like atoms, you always could, but
we haven’t long known it.
A split infinitive looks like this: ‘to boldly go’, ‘to thoroughly deserve’, ‘to absolutely deny’ or ‘fear to lightly tread’. It is a verb in its infinitive form with an adverb lodged between its ‘to’ and its ‘go’ or whatever.
It happens all the time. It’s a way of modifying a key verb right at its heart. Nothing was ever really wrong with it. Old grammarians, who looked to Latin for their precedents in most
things, used to argue that since one could not split an infinitive in Latin, one should not in English. But then the infinitive form in Latin was a single word (‘ambulare’: ‘to walk’) that could only be split with a heavy iron tool.
There’s also a sense that the usage is sloppy. Sometimes it does feel untidy. If so, change it: ‘boldly to go’ or ‘to go boldly’ are always available.
Let’s stop worrying about the wrong things none of us seem able to forget, and start worrying about the one thing none of us seems able to remember. Namely, how to build sound sentences of every kind. Let’s do syntax, not pedantry.