Dumb Writing Advice, Part 2: Yielding to Nitwits

“Happy the man who has never been told that it is wrong to split an infinitive,” says The Economist’s style guide: “The ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it.”

So modifiers preceding the verb in an infinitival clause (as in to clearly demonstrate) must be avoided because grammatically uninformed readers might experience irritation. The Economist’s writers are expected to acquiesce to opinionated nitwits.

And that is just what they do, even when the result is clunky and ambiguous sentences with ill-placed adverbs (see one case discussed here and another here). The magazine’s policy is basically identical with the one that Arnold Zwicky has called Crazies Win: It says that grammatical reality as evidenced in centuries of English literature should be ignored, because what matters is whether some ignoramus might get grouchy.

Cowardly advice like this isn’t restricted infinitive-splitting. My friend Levi Montgomery points to a page by Maeve Maddox on the Daily Writing Tips site, headed “Beginning a Sentence With And or But.” It begins, promisingly, with facts: Writers have begun whole sentences with coordinators (the “coordinating conjunctions” of traditional terminology) at least since the early 8th century. The proportion of sentences beginning with coordinators may be as high as 10 percent in “first-rate writing”; “even the most conservative grammarians” agree that no rule forbids it.

One would think, then, that novice writers could feel free to follow the practice of the expert writers we teach them to admire. But instead, cowardice outranks integrity. Maddox says:

Authors capable of “first-rate writing” are one matter. Teachers, on the other hand (and editors working with grammatically challenged adults) are wise to advise against it.

So evidence from great writers down the centuries shows it’s fine to begin sentences with coordinators, yet teachers are still wise to stipulate otherwise? What kind of irrational pedagogy is this?

Those who teach that well-crafted English prose has no sentence-initial coordinators are teaching a lie, as every admired work of literature you fetch down from your shelf will confirm.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s most self-consciously literary work, is replete with sentences beginning with and, but, and or. One occurs after just half a dozen sentences of the main text (“But he suddenly started up…”).

F. Scott Fitgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby does likewise, as you will see if you read as far as the ninth sentence (“And, after boasting this way of my tolerance. … “).

I won’t carry on with this pointless documentation of the obvious; every work of literature I have examined, and every newspaper and magazine, has sentences beginning with coordinators.

Maddox brushes such facts aside. “Every craft demands that beginners learn in stages,” she maintains; there is “pedagogical usefulness” to a rule telling beginning writers not to begin a sentence with a coordinator, because novice writers “don’t need to have all the rules and exceptions dumped on them at the outset.”

Yet this implied burden of “rules and exceptions” is nonexistent. Nothing has ever banned coordinators from independent clauses. Yes, there are rules; for example, coordinators are prefixed in English, rather than suffixed as in Japanese. An independent clause like And I agreed complies with that rule (the and is at the beginning where it should be), and with every other genuine syntactic rule of English. The sentence is just as grammatical as I agreed.

When should a sentence begin with a particular coordinator? When it gives you the shade of meaning you need.

• We open a sentence with and when it is a tightly linked immediate follow-up to the previous one: “I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer” (Fitzgerald, Gatsby, Chapter 1).
• We use or to introduce a sentence that presents an afterthought expressing a temporarily overlooked alternative: “It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name” (ibid.).
• Initial but signals that the content of the sentence might not have been expected given the prior context: “At first I thought it was another party. … But there wasn’t a sound” (ibid., Chapter 5).

Writing instructors should point out facts like this, and teach about how word meaning determines the structure of good prose. Yielding to cowardice instead—telling novices never to do things lest they do them too much or do them in the wrong way or incur someone’s disapproval—is dereliction of duty. It’s professional misconduct.