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By the way, if you open
Time or
Newsweek or
The Washington Post or the
Wall Street Journal or any other respected journal and start reading articles at random, you will notice that about 8% of all sentences start with coordinating conjunctions ('and,' 'but,' 'for,' 'or,' 'nor').
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Also by the way, I once had an online discussion about this with someone who claimed to have been a copyeditor for
Rolling Stone Magazine. I pointed out a research paper in an academic journal that found that, over the course of a particular year (maybe 1997 or so), 8% of the sentences contained in articles on the front page of the
New York Times began with coordinating conjunctions. (I've spent the last 20 minutes trying to come up with a citation to the article, but without success. I think it was 8%, but it may have been even higher -- possibly 12%.)
His response was that a rag like the
NYT may go in for such a plebian sentence structure, but top-notch periodicals like
Rolling Stone Magazine never would.
So I went to Rolling Stone's website, picked five articles at random, and showed him that every single article contained at least one sentence that began with "and" or "but"; and the overall number of sentences beginning with coordinating conjunctions was slightly higher than the one reported for the
NYT front-page stories.
He then responded (I believe incorrectly, but I didn't look into it further) that the online articles are entirely different from the print articles. The print articles in
Rolling Stone, he maintained, would never allow an author to begin a sentence with "and" or "but."
I gave up at that point, but another participant (this was in an old Yahoo! Groups discussion) went to the library and got a print version of the magazine. Sure enough, the same ratio of sentences began with "and" or "but" in the print version as in the online version. (Different issue, so different articles.)
Dude was
