That’s the point. It is not a rule, but a superstition. Try to find some authority for the “rule.” You won’t.
So was my coworker wrong when she said she was following the AP style guide in not using “and” to begin a sentence?
(FWIW, last night she rewrote the entire fundraising letter, making it sound much better in the process, so this is a moot point; I’m just anal sometimes)
Daniel
If you are in a situation in which you are required to follow a style guide, then most certainly should you do so.
If you are not required to follow a style guide, then it is only a personal preference when to do so and which style guide to follow.
If, as you appear to report about your co-worker, the ability to read or understand a style guide is lacking, then the best resort is to a large, unabridged dictionary. Dropped from a height.
I’m sure someone has the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual handy. I don’t. Two observations:
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It is a style book, not a book of grammatical rules. So it does not express the rules of grammar; instead it expresses the stylistic preferences of the Associated Press.
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Most journalists use the AP style, and I see many examples of sentences beginning with coordinating conjunctions in newspapers and magazines. So that means that either the publications don’t use AP style or the editorial staffs of the publications are sloppy.
Or your coworker was mistaken. You can always ask your coworker to show you the “rule” in the stylebook. That’s the fun way 
That’s possible–and like I said, she rewrote the letter anyway, making the point moot. I’m just curious whether the AP guide actually includes such a prohibition, or if she was just pulling it out of thin air in order to defend her substitution of “plus” for “and.” (We were having this conversation with my boss, and she may have felt put on the spot by my denigrating her use of “Plus” to begin a sentence).
She’s not dim, or a bad writer; I think she may just have been mistaken in this instance.
Daniel
This is a list of non-errors. It is a good place to start when someone gets preachy about Grammar with you.
http://www.medword.com/language/errors-non-errors.html
I also found the final chapter of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams, both amusing and helpful on issues involving grammatical rules.http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226899152/102-5202829-4834556?v=glance
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.
And you may ask yourself how do I work this?
And you may ask yourself where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself this is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself this is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.
And, of course, there is the “rule” against ending sentences with prepositions, best codified here:
Day attacked Loeb with a straight razor, causing 58 wounds. Loeb, naked and covered with blood, staggered out of the shower. Loeb was rushed to the prison hospital for blood transfusions. Leopold watched as prison doctors and two Loeb family physicians tried unsuccessfully to save his friend’s life. James Day claimed that the razor cuts were made as he attempted to resist Loeb’s sexual advances. Ed Lahey, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, wrote one of the wittiest leads ever in his story describing Loeb’s demise: ‘Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition.’"
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/LEO_LOEB.HTM
It’s not the snappiest stylistic choice, but it’s perfectly legitimate.
The Book of Genesis’ first chapter has 31 lines, 29 of which begin with “and.” Chapter two has 20 lines, 14 of them beginning with “and.” I didn’t check the third chapter, but I spot a precedent here.
The Bible, especially the KJV, is a major source of sentences beginning with ‘And’. Classical literature tends to do this often as well. I think the reason that some grammarians frown on it is that it is easy for a novice to create sentence fragments with ‘and’ or ‘but’. It also looks bad in business writing, which is why Microsoft Word’s grammar checker flags it, but then, the passive voice is also flagged.
Used correctly, a sentence beginning with ‘and’ or ‘but’ links that sentence to the previous one. When I write, sentences beginning with ‘and’ are very important in linking together actions that occur in sequence. Sentences beginning with ‘but’ are very important in noting a contrast between something just mentioned. For example:
His legs were numb; his chest was wracked by insufferable pain. But his hand swept still feebly across the surface of the plain…
Here, it’s very important to point out that while the character is in great pain and cannot move parts of his body, his hand is still moving despite the pain. For me, not beginning the second sentence with ‘but’ would fail to connect the moving hand with the pain and paralysis in the first sentence. The next sentence, incidentally, begins with ‘And’:
And it grasped (something), and it trembled.
This links the feeble movement of the character’s hand with finding something. Without ‘And…’, the action of the third sentence is not linked to the other two. Now, I understand that it would not be legitimate for this third sentence to be “And his knuckles were white”, because that doesn’t relate to the action in the previous sentences. Probably the best test, then, of whether you can legitimately start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ is this: Would it still work if you had used a comma instead of starting a new sentence? The example above still works as one sentence, but it’s an awkward 52-word-long sentence. Three sentences still conveys the same sequence of linked actions, but is more managable than a single sentence.
I don’t want to sound critical, but the style (here in America, anyway) is to place the question mark outside of the quotation marks unless the quote is the question. This rule also applies to periods, but not to semicolons. Don’t know the reason for that distinction.
There is one other factor we should mention, and that is audience. If your audience reacts negatively to initial conjunctions, and you don’t want negative reactions from your audience, don’t use initial conjunctions.
Sidenote: I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression by using the term “school marm”. I certainly didn’t mean it to refer to K-12 teachers. (Does anybody still use it that way?) I meant it to refer to certain old-school proscriptive grammarians. Laura Bush isn’t a school marm. But very often, Bill Safire is.
Well, since you mention it, I made that very error in the OP. I know better; I just slipped up. :smack:
Or are all conjunctions prohibited from the start of a sentence?
And are counter-examples from literature enough to bust the rule?
Because one can argue that would make archaicisms found in literature acceptable usage.
But I don’t know anyone who really makes that argument.
Not that I want to be argumentative.
Nor is there any need for hostility.
Yet this is an important question.
Rather than it being some silly exercise.
For what it’s worth.
And peace out.
The quoted examples are no way, no how sentences :). The others I would not object to, although they give me varying degrees of cringiness. “Not,” “Rather,” and “For” are not conjunctions, anyway: the first two are adverbs, and the last is, in this context, a preposition.
Daniel
The older the example, the less convincing the case. But if professional writers break the “rule” all the time, is it really a rule? Or is it a superstition?
For those who want rules, here are some more:
Moriah is the Master of the Tempered Snark in presenting counterpoints that zing without going over the edge. That paragraph was a classic example of that style.
I mentioned “conjunctive adverbs” above; “rather” is a further example of them.
But I want to address your comment about sentences.
A proper, grammatical English sentence does have subject and predicate without something subordinating them. And our teachers all made sure that we knew that sentence fragments are bad.
Sometimes the sentence fragment, standing alone, provides a crisp, pithy response that the complete sentence would not. Moriah’s post provides a few examples.
Our object regarding English style is to see people writing clear, coherent essays and paragraphs that express their thought accurately and clearly. Not to insist on “rules.”
And the previous paragraph constitutes a good example of when to use a sentence fragment effectively. As does this one on when to start with a preposition (remember the OP?).
Good writing is done by those who know the principles of expressive prose – and when it’s appropriate to break them. An essay written with punctilious attention to the “rules” of style may be lacking some oomph that it would have gained by the occasional intelligent ignoring of them.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Oh, I agree! It’s worth distinguishing, however, between constructions that may appear in bourgeoinics writing (i.e., writing you can get away with in a business letter or report) and constructions that are clearly informal.
“And we succeeded on each of our goals” is much less likely to raise any eyebrows than is “Rather than it being some silly exercise.”
At any rate, sentence fragments are a different issue from conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence; I don’t want folks to confuse the two.
Daniel
Some of those “rules” are not really rules. For example:
Many words that one would think are prepositions are really used as adverbs, especially when they end a sentence. Not that there is anything wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. One example is: “Take your cap off!” Off is used as an adverb in that sentence, modifying the verb take.
Right!!