And now, a post about whether you can use 'and' at the start of a sentence.

When I was at school, Our Sacred Lady of the Mean Streets and Correct Grammar, teachers told me that if I used ‘and’ at the start of a sentence, that it was the worst thing I could ever do. This was also the way they felt about using ‘because’ at the start of a sentence.

This was because these words are conjunctions.A conjunction is a word that connects two other words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. For some reason, many teachers used to think that it was a bit unclassy to start a sentence like this, maybe because it makes a sentence look incomplete.

In times like this, I like to turn to The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage book, which says

‘There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with 'and', but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon times onwards’

Snap, New Fowler’s Modern English. There is pretty much no reason why you can’t use ‘and’ at the start of a sentence. In fact, almost all of the best writers do this whenever they feel like it. Take J.M Coetzee for example:

‘In his youth Dostoevsky had been attracted to utopian socialism of the Fourietrist variety. But four years in a prison camp in Siberia shook his faith.’

Here, you can see that far from being weird and wrong, the conjunction ‘and’ has been a helpful sentence opener.

For any teachers reading this, hey, I know you were just trying to do the right thing. But for all you up-and-coming teachers whose dream it is to create the grammar superstars of tomorrow, just remember that not all clauses have to be complete – a sentence can be dependant on another clause in order to make sense.

To see us out, let’s appreciate this excellent writing from Daphne Du Maurier, as her heroine, an unnamed woman, wanders through the ruins of her old home.

‘And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognise, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.’

Creepy, conjunction-begun stuff!