Starting a Sentence with ‘And’ and ‘But’
One of the more persistent grammatical superstitions is that you can’t begin a sentence with conjunctions such as And and But. This is curious, because many of the finest writers in the English language – Shakespeare, Blake, Tennyson, Kipling, to name just four – have kicked off sentences with And, and so has the Bible: read the opening chapter. Probably the most popular rebel was Blake, who chose to begin his poem (better known as Jerusalem) with ‘And did those feet in ancient time . . . ’
Much the same applies to But. This time Thomas Macaulay, in his The History of England, is the hero of the rebel cause:
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
There is no rule to say that you can’t begin a sentence or a paragraph with the conjunction But. When you want to express a doubt or outright disagreement, beginning a sentence with But can emphasise and dramatise your point. But don’t let it become a sloppy habit!
The Daily Express some years ago carried a memorable sentence in its sporting pages that not only began with But, but ended with but. And the sentence that followed it began with And:
Northumberland and Humberside will each hold the trophy for six months after fighting out an exciting 1-1 draw. But if the result was indecisive, then the soccer was anything but. And when all the medals have been engraved . . .
The sentence, as you will have seen, is all at once a simple, complex and beautiful construction. As Winston Churchill, one of the most expert users of the language, once wrote: ‘ . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence – which is a noble thing’. Before we pass on to how a sentence is actually assembled with different kinds of words, it’s worth remembering the hierarchy in which it exists:
A word consists of one or more morphemes (speech elements).
A phrase consists of one or more words.
A clause consists of one or more phrases.
A sentence consists of one or more clauses.
A paragraph consists of one or more sentences.
Same word – different roles
We all know what the word round means – or do we? Here it is, in five different roles. Can you tell where it is used as a noun, preposition, adjective, verb and adverb?
| A | The people gathered round. |
| B | I bought a round of drinks. |
| C | You round your lips when speaking. |
| D | He has a round face. |
| E | We drove round France last week. |
(A adverb; B noun; C verb; D adjective; E preposition)
The Building Blocks of Sentences: Parts of Speech
In Victorian times, when life was simpler, so, apparently was grammar. Here is a little verse widely used to teach young children the parts of speech during the latter part of the 19th century:
Three little words we often see,
Determiners, like a, an and the.
A Noun’s the name of anything,
A school or garden, hoop or string.
An Adjective tells the kind of noun,
Like great, small, pretty, white or brown.
Instead of nouns the Pronouns stand –
John’s head, his face, my arm, your hand.
Verbs tell of something being done,
To read, write, count, sing, jump or run.
How things are done, the Adverbs tell,
Like slowly, quickly, ill or well.
A Preposition stands before
A noun, as in a room, or through a door.
Conjunctions join the nouns together,
Like boy or girl, wind and weather.
The Interjection shows surprise,
Like Oh! How charming. Ah! How wise!
The whole are called ‘Nine Parts of Speech’,
Which reading, writing and speaking teach.
For millions of Victorian children this rhyme served as a gentle introduction to the terrors of parsing – the art of analysing the various roles played by words in a sentence. Whether the terror was real or imagined no doubt depended upon how the subject was taught. For the majority of children it was probably never an easy business to grasp, and this went for the teachers, too, to the extent that for a quarter of a century from the 1960s it was the misguided fashion in many quarters not to teach it at all. As a result many millions of today’s adults in the English-speaking world have a big black hole in their grammatical education.
The fact that many words defy a single classification doesn’t make things easier. We have seen how the word round can play five different roles depending upon how it is used in a sentence. Many other words are similarly versatile: love can act as a noun, verb and adjective, and so can light; fast can play the roles of noun, verb, adjective and adverb, and so on. That can be used as an adjective and as a pronoun:
That jacket belongs to me. (adjective)
That is my jacket. (pronoun)
Words – especially neologisms, or newly-coined words – also have the confusing habit of migrating from one class to another:
The doctor observed the patient’s knee jerk. (noun / verb)
His speech produced the inevitable knee-jerk reaction. (adjective)
The President was a master of the art of the knee-jerk. (noun)
Not all words have this chameleon quality, however. All words can be divided into two broad classes: open classes (which freely admit new words) and closed classes (which rarely do). For example:
OPEN CLASSES
| Nouns | software, gazumper, Fergy, tummytuck, spin doctor |
| Adjectives | neural, digital, cellular, quaffable, hands-on |
| Verbs | outed, overdosed, stargaze, deselect, nuke |
| Adverbs | breezily, chaotically, totally, tackily |
| Interjections | Phew! aahhh, ouch! Phooorrh! |
CLOSED CLASSES
| Determiners | the, which, my, that, your, these |
| Pronouns | I, me, we, hers, someone, whom |
| Conjunctions | and, or, but, when, since, as |
| Prepositions | at, with, in, by, to, from |
| Auxiliaries | be,
|