Sticky Notes

Dear Readers:

I was just reading an e-zine I get monthly...I get a lot of them and read them all. Do you read ours? Administrative Avenue's newsletter is called Shorthand and you can subscribe to it here.

Anyways, I was reading a rather lengthy article in this particular e-zine that threatened to be interesting. The only problem being that I was distracted by the large number of sentences beginning with "And"...I counted over 20 of them in the one article! You see, I was lead away from the main message the article was trying to convey by my desire to have the sentences flow better. This is one of the diseases I suffer from as an Administrative Assistant -- proofreaditis...it's a debilitating condition causing the patient to suffer from tics when encountering mistakes in publications. There is no cure, so reading my local paper (which I swear is proofread by preschoolers or those monkeys at typewriters) causes great pain.

Here's a few notes on using a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence:

Beginning a sentence with a conjunction

It offends those who wish to confine English usage in a logical straitjacket that writers often begin sentences with “and” or “but.” True, one should be aware that many such sentences would be improved by becoming clauses in compound sentences; but there are many effective and traditional uses for beginning sentences thus. One example is the reply to a previous assertion in a dialogue: “But, my dear Watson, the criminal obviously wore expensive boots or he would not have taken such pains to scrape them clean.” Make it a rule to consider whether your conjunction would repose more naturally within the previous sentence or would lose in useful emphasis by being demoted from its position at the head of a new sentence.

From: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html

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Sentences beginning with "and" or "but" are found in English as early as the ninth century, in the Old English Chronicle, and such sentences can also be found in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Lord Macaulay, Charles Dickens, and others. There's nothing inherently wrong with the practice.

If a sentence is incomplete, or if so many sentences begin with "and" that its overuse is notable, that is indeed a problem, but one that should be treated on its own merits.

From: Random House

Now, I'm ready to admit my own transgressions. Some of you probably ask yourselves, "Copier Girl, what's with all the dots in sentences?" I mean, in the words of Chandler Bing from Friends, "could there be anymore dots?"

I guess I write as if I'm talking to someone...taking a pause as I need it and representing that pause as three dots. That must be what the writer of that article is doing...maybe she talks with a lot of "ands".

And...I'm...done...with...this...rant...

Sincerely yours,

Copier Girl

/vhb

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