You should not not start a sentence with because.
Baby Boomers will start singing along to one of the early television spelling/pun lessons when I start quoting the official song of the Mickey Mouse Club (the one with Annette, not Britney 17 ), the one beginning, “M-I-C.” And now you can hum along in your head to the rest of the song.
What a terrible lesson the Mouseketeers were giving us kiddies. K-E-Why? Because they were violating that stringent grammar rule: never start a sentence with because. K-E-Why? Because . . . well, I'm not sure why. I’ve not seen anything that offers a legitimate linguistic reason to not begin a sentence with because or with other conjunctions.
I picture this argument, not among us aspiring Mouseketeers on grade-school playgrounds, but among aspiring linguists supervising grade-school playgrounds:
“You should never start a sentence with because!”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because you shouldn’t. And never start a sentence with and.” “Why not?”
“Because.”
“But you just started a sentence with and.”
“Because it worked. It was an additional point, and I communicated that quickly by starting the sentence with And.” “Oh, so you can start a sentence with and?”
“No. You can’t start a sentence with a conjunction.”
52
Bill Brohaugh
“If you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, how would I have otherwise started this sentence?”
“My point exactly. And never start a sentence with but."
“Why not?”
“Because.”
Let’s consider the function of a conjunction—a nicely rhyming phrase that sounds like it would make a good song, and indeed it does. So let’s move ahead a decade to the ’70s and the venerable Schoolhouse Rock shorts that taught us how to hum along with curricula between Saturday morning cartoons. A song called “Conjunction Junction” used railroad metaphors to show us how a conjunction worked: “Hooking up two boxcars and making ’em run right.” Those boxcars, sang the singing educators, included words, clauses, and phrases. But not sentences? Too big a boxcar?
The truth is that this is more a stylistic than a grammatical dictate. The thinking seems to be that the conjunction must reside between a capital letter and an ending period, isolated within a sentence, so as to more clearly operate in connecting the sentence’s components. If a sentence is begun by a conjunction, the elements that it connects are by definition isolated—by said princess-and-the-pea period. How can the conjunction connect what the period separates?
This is decent logic and a strong consideration in writing powerful prose. The more closely you can physically and mentally draw words and thoughts together, the clearer your writing. But nothing in grammar demands such non-separation, and in fact separating highly connected thoughts can help writers avoid run- ons, add muscular ripples and rhythms to the prose, and give distinct thoughts elevated importance in distinct sentences ... and then driving these thusly elevated thoughts back into union with a
word that indicates relationship (and, because), shift (but), option (or).
However, the persnickitors would argue about... well, if there's anything they should argue about from their point of view, they would argue about this sentence, which begins with however. However being not only a synonym of the reviled sentence-starter but, but also a conjunction.
Simply said, a conjunction joins. Period.
Although . . .
M-I-C my point? And as not to leave you hanging ... M-O-U-S-E!
54
Bill Brohaugh