Stewart McCoy wrote: > If we corrected each other's mistakes in English, we'd be here all > day.
And wasting time at that, since it would largely be the blind leading the blind. > 1) One should not normally begin a sentence with "But", since "but" > is a word used to co-ordinate two parts of a sentence. I'm not sure what "normally" means here. But real-life writers of repute begin sentences with "But" all the time. Here's a sample from works available online, and which can therefore be searched electronically: Charles Dickens begins 301 sentences in "Great Expectations" with "But." Jane Austen begins 293 sentences in "Emma" with "But." George Bernard Shaw starts 61 sentences in "The Perfect Wagnerite" with "But." Robert Louis Stevenson starts 139 sentences in "Treasure Island" with "But." Thorsten Veblen starts 161 sentences in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" with "But." H.G. Wells starts 95 sentences in "The Time Machine" with "But." Charles Darwin starts 332 sentences in "The Origin of Species" with "But." Winston Churchill starts 256 sentences in "The River War" with "But." I'm not sure why anyone thinks there's a "rule" against starting a sentence with "but." But there's no particular reason not to, as demonstrated by the variety of reasons put forth for it. Joseph Devlin, in "How to Speak and Write Correctly," a book you can read online, says "Never commence a sentence with And, But, Since, Because, and other similar weak words." But he begins nine sentences in the book with "But." Devlin's reason for not using "but" to start a sentence differs from Stewart's. But neither reason holds water: Stewart's is circular and Devlin's is a bare assertion that fails to understand that the strength of a word has much to do with context. This is particularly true in musical settings, by the way. In Gabrieli's "Dulcis Jesu" a couple of soloists sing the first four words of the text for rather a while before the choir enters dramatically on "and." To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
