Can you start a sentence with And?

At school we were taught never to start sentences with “And”.

And yet newspaper journalists are trained to start a sentence with and. I do it all the time.

Not starting a sentence with And is one of the first so-called rules professional writers learn to break.

There’s nothing wrong with using “And” to begin a sentence or a paragraph. It is a great way to smooth the flow when you have a series of short sentences that would otherwise be too staccato for comfortable reading.

Go ahead, start a sentence with and

Only break this rule in moderation. Overusing “And” at the start of sentences quickly becomes boring.

As Keith Waterhouse points out in his excellent but old book on Daily Mirror Style, too many sentences starting with the word means your writing reads like the New English Bible.

I aim for only one “And” sentence start in a short piece of 300 words. For longer stories, you can get away with using it a few times - about once every 3-500 words. Control any urge to sprinkle sentences starting with “And” through your copy.

Other conjunctions

The school rule didn’t just apply to “And”. Starting sentences with other conjunctions was also forbidden. As an aside, conjunctions are ‘joining’ words used to string phrases together – usually, but not always, to build more complex sentences.

There are plenty of alternative conjunctions to call on at the start of your sentences:

• “But” is a great way to start a sentence that disagrees with the previous one.
• “Yet” is a less-frequently used alternative, it’s a little more nuanced.
• “Or” is a great word for helping text flow.
• Some people don’t like sentences to start with “However”. I would regard that as another rule worth breaking.
• “Although” is a possibility. In practice, it can be better to shorten the word to “Though” at the start of a sentence.