Posted by David Brooks on April 20, 1999 at 14:28:59:
In Reply to: Then, it happened... posted by Edwin M. Kiser on April 19, 1999 at 17:34:14:
Sounds like the worst sort of mindless grammar-rule-following.
Your teacher is right, in that it can be confusing and awkward to start a sentence with a connector ("and, but, then" ...) - but your teacher is wrong, in that it can be elegant and effective to do so. No prizes for guessing how I would categorize AR's usage.
Blindly following rules like that is a good way to end up with bland committee-speak writing, or worse. I had an editor once who had learned "you shouldn't split infinitives." Personally, I like to split infinitives. She would automatically un-split them without doing any rewriting, creating clumsy and stupid sentences.
In theory, this should have taught me not to split infinitives; actually, it taught me to make sure somebody else edited my stuff.