Starting a Sentence With “And” or “But”
Open almost any respected novel, newspaper or work of history and you will find sentences beginning with And or But within a few pages. Studies of published English put the figure at somewhere around one sentence in ten.
So where did the rule come from?
A teaching shortcut that escaped
Children write in fragments. Left alone, a seven-year-old produces: And then we went to the beach. And then we had ice cream. And then it rained.
The quickest way to stop that is a flat prohibition. It is easier to say never start a sentence with “and” than to explain when a conjunction opens a sentence usefully and when it just strings clauses together.
The shortcut works. The problem is that nobody ever comes back to lift it, so a rule designed for a specific developmental stage gets carried into adult writing as though it were grammar.
What the authorities say
Chicago notes that a substantial percentage of sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions, and calls the contrary belief a myth. Merriam-Webster records the usage as standard and traces it back to Old English. Fowler’s dismisses the prohibition outright.
The King James Bible opens hundreds of verses with And. Whatever else it is, it is not sloppy prose.
What it does when it works
Opening with a conjunction is a rhythm device. It takes a clause that would have been subordinate and gives it its own sentence, and the full stop before it creates a pause the comma would not.
- We checked the figures twice, but they were wrong.
- We checked the figures twice. But they were wrong.
The second lands harder. The pause isolates the reversal and gives it weight. That is the entire effect, and it is a real one.
But is particularly useful at the head of a paragraph, where it signals a turn before the reader has committed to the new direction.
When it stops working
The device runs on scarcity. Used once in a page it is emphasis; used in six consecutive sentences it is the seven-year-old at the beach.
Three things to watch:
- Frequency. If two openings in a paragraph both start with But, one of them is not earning it.
- Fragments. And the results. is not a sentence. The conjunction is fine; the missing verb is not.
- Register. Formal academic and legal writing still lean against it. Not because it is wrong, but because the convention there is conservative, and conventions are what you follow when writing for a particular room.
However, therefore, and the rest
The same anxiety attaches to However and Therefore at the start of a sentence, and there it is genuinely misplaced — these are conjunctive adverbs and have always opened sentences without objection.
What they cannot do is join two independent clauses with only a comma. The plan was sound, however it failed is a comma splice. It needs a full stop or a semicolon: The plan was sound. However, it failed.
That is a real rule, and it is worth more attention than the imaginary one about And.
Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.
