The Turner Ink blog contains rants, bloopers, observations and opinions. It also has handy tips on grammar and punctuation such as colons: semicolons; and full stops. As well as some very useful ‘how tos’. Feel free to leave comments. Be nice though.

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Starting a sentence with And or But. Can we? Yes we can!

26th
Feb
by Sarah Turner

Do you remember being told at school that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction i.e. a joining word like And, But, Yet? Well here’s a shocker: you can.

If you want to be really formal you might want to use In addition or Nevertheless.

But for the rest of us mere mortals starting a sentence with And or But is perfectly acceptable. In fact copywriters do it all the time as it makes copy informal, snappy and really gets a point across.

Just try not to use a conjunction at the end of a sentence. Yeah..but..no..but..and yeah…but

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This entry was posted on Thursday 26th February 2009 at 5:53pm and is filed under Grammar tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Starting a sentence with And or But. Can we? Yes we can!”

  1. Tim Jinkerson says:
    25 November 2009 at 12:16pm

    Charles Wesley obviously believed it was acceptable, he started one of the greatest hymns ever written with the word ‘And’:
    http://www.hymnsite.com/lyrics/umh363.sht

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