Is this the way English is going as a "living language"?

[Larimar]

Is it now officially acceptable grammar to start sentences with coordinating conjunctions? I was taught - and for years have been teaching students - that such a thing qualifies as a sentence fragment.

My department is adopting a new edition of our comp textbook, and in it, even some of the essays written by professionals have multiple examples.

Is this the way the living language is developing? I stopped teaching pronoun-antecedent agreement some time ago because usage changed. Is something similar happening with sentence structure, that what didn't used to be correct is now considered correct?


Larimar

[dismalist]

So, each college and university sent their budget request to the legislature.

Such is likely common parlance.

Whatever.

[Morden]

Coordinate conjunctions at the beginning of sentences have been acceptable grammatically for a long time. Each clause remains independent. It's really more of a style issue, and more venues are accepting it now. 

[dismalist]

Coordinate conjunctions at the beginning of sentences have been acceptable grammatically for a long time. Each clause remains independent. It's really more of a style issue, and more venues are accepting it now.

Yes, in my senescence I have begun sentences with "And" once or twice. My hands shook when I did it. It had been verbally beaten out of me in 2nd or 3rd grade. Took me a long time to get over it. :-)

[marshwiggle]

So, each college and university sent their budget request to the legislature.

Such is likely common parlance.

Whatever.

And people speak that way.

If that matters.

[dismalist]

So, each college and university sent their budget request to the legislature.

Such is likely common parlance.

Whatever.

And people speak that way.

If that matters.

I have heard of professional individuals, foreign born, with English as a second language, writing "like" between clauses. Such people aren't stupid; they picked up the garbage from us, like.

[Larimar]

So, each college and university sent their budget request to the legislature.

Such is likely common parlance.

Whatever.

And people speak that way.

If that matters.

Yes, they do. There's no problem with writing dialogue that way, or poetry, because it needs to read like it would sound and be true to the voice of the character or speaker. For academic arguments, however, I've always thought coordinating conjunctions shouldn't start a sentence. Hm. The times, they are a-changin', I guess.

[mamselle]

I just had that debate with myself this afternoon in editing something.

If I left the sentence as it was, it would have run 4 lines.

Splitting it seemed to interrupt the connection I was trying to show between the two ideas I was expressing.

But if I allowed myself to start the second half with an "And," I could show that connection and trim back my sentence length at the same time.

Maybe it came down to a sense of trusting--or not trusting--my readers to see the connection suspended, as it were, in mid-air between the period of the first sentence and the capital letter on the next one.

And of course, I've just now done it twice within this post alone.

Hmmm....

M.
 

[mbelvadi]

Those who learned absolute prescriptive rules from Strunk & White, as I did in the 70s, need to set it aside and assume most of what they learned from it (and the teachers who peddled it) is today just plain wrong.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/21/against-strunk-whites-the-elements-of-style/
There are many other articles, from English profs, from linguists, etc. that will back this up. Just google "strunk white wrong" to get started on a whole world of Elements of Style critique.

[marshwiggle]

And people speak that way.

If that matters.

Yes, they do. There's no problem with writing dialogue that way, or poetry, because it needs to read like it would sound and be true to the voice of the character or speaker.

Slightly tangential, but if anyone remembers when Andy Rooney used to do a segment on "60 Minutes", he wrote a book that collected material from there. In the introduction, he pointed out that if he included the text in print exactly the way he said it on the show, it would sound very choppy and odd, so he edited the pieces for readability.

[mamselle]

I've worked as a transcriptionist in the not-so-distant past.

One always edits for flow on the fly.

M.

[Juvenal]

"And after me, the deluge."  However, read that in some form--somewhere.

[mamselle]

Except in French, there's no "et" preceding.

It's just, <<Apres moi, le deluge...>>

M.

[little bongo]

And people speak that way.

If that matters.

Yes, they do. There's no problem with writing dialogue that way, or poetry, because it needs to read like it would sound and be true to the voice of the character or speaker.

Slightly tangential, but if anyone remembers when Andy Rooney used to do a segment on "60 Minutes", he wrote a book that collected material from there. In the introduction, he pointed out that if he included the text in print exactly the way he said it on the show, it would sound very choppy and odd, so he edited the pieces for readability.

Rooney was a long-time hero of mine. The man cared about language and about being decent.

[kaysixteen]

That 'don't start a sentence with a conjunction' rule is one of a number of forced Latinate grammar rules imposed by 18th century prep school grammarians, owing to the fact that Latin has such a rule.  It is not natural to English.