Or can you?

I'm sure we were all taught that you can't start a sentence with 'but'. Yet you do see it writing these days and on occasion I've started using it myself. I do give it some thought whether it's really needed, but sometimes it seems to fit well. Is there a grammatical case why 'but' can't be used whereas 'yet' can? In some ways they seem pretty interchangeable. Otherwise is it merely a convention that is slowly changing? And while on the subject, 'and' pops in at the start of sentences as well in modern writing. Are we becoming free of unnecessary chains of the past or just losing the plot?

Regards, Andy

Writers have 'broken' this rule ever since Shakespeare and I'm sure before.

But it does break a basic rule of grammar, because 'but' and 'yet' and 'and' are conjunctions, whose job, by definition, is to join two separate clauses into a single sentence, in a way which expresses how the two clauses are related ('but' relates them differently from how 'and' does, for example). They're not joining two clauses if there's only one clause in the sentence.

There's only one way I can think of you can start a sentence with 'but' and be entirely correct in traditional grammar:

But for the driver breaking the speed limit, we would have missed the plane.

However, in creative writing we're always trying to write not just correctly, but expressively. So of course there are times when you might want to write:

I left decorating the cake till last, because I knew I'd got all ninety-seven candles, and everything else I needed. But I hadn't.

or

He knew that he should write to thank her immediately. "Money and game should always be acknowledged the day you receive it," his mother used to say. Yet he felt some huge resistance to putting pen to paper.

or

She loved him. And she wanted him.

The point about these examples is that they're using the the stronger break of a full stop, and only then the conjunction, to emphasise the change of direction implied in the 'but' or the 'yet', or in the case of the last one, it's not so much a change of direction, arguably, as a change of gear, racking up the sexual tension.

But breaking a traditional rule to an expressive purpose only works if it's in relation to the normal way the rule works. If the writer always chops the sentences around every which way, then the impact of something like this is going to be weakened, at best, so that things are less expressive, and at worst it's going to become a mannerism - a tic - which irritates the reader.

Which is why this is a case where I'll almost sign up to the "You have to know [I would say not just know, but really feel] rules before you can break them", idea. Only then will you make the right call about whether, this time, this non-standardism is really earning its keep.

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Just looked it up in David Crystal, who says that starting a sentence with a conjunction has been done continuously since the anglo-saxons, and the rule about not doing it started in the 19th century.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!

Which is why I'll 'almost' sign up to it - what's been codified as a 'rule' is more about understanding the difference between the two possibilities. As Crystal says, ANY stylistic habit becomes ineffective or irritating if you do it to often - so the more ways you have up your sleeve to express this kind of thing the better.

I don't think "but" and "yet" are the same - I would use 'but' for anything where the two halves don't smoothly proceed one to the next, but 'yet' only where the second half is very definitly in contradiction:

I hoped to be early, but the bus delayed me.

I hoped to be early, yet couldn't stop myself fussing over my makeup.


SOED gives

"yet": in spite of that, but nevertheless, even then... more emphatic than "but".

Woolf : "Writing is agony... yet we live by it"
Hobsong: "He has asked for an urgent appointment and yet arrives late"

I sometimes think 'yet' has a loftier, more aspirational feel to it than 'but'. E.g.:

They said it couldn't be done. They said no man alive could do such a thing. Yet [But] I, the great Miraldo, succeeded where all who went before me had failed.

Thanks very much, Emma, I really appreciate the time you given. Your answers are always so clear and comprehensive and your examples are really helpful. It’s been one of those silly little things that I’ve puzzled about and I feel able to approach it with more confidence now.

But breaking a traditional rule to an expressive purpose only works if it's in relation to the normal way the rule works.

That’s really helpful and cleared up a lot of things for me.

RJH – I agree, ‘yet’ does have a different feel to it and gives a sense of an older, and perhaps more eloquent, time.

But you couldn't write a sentence in a womag story beginning Yet.

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Well you could. But you'd have to be clever about it.

Manusha, you're welcome

Jem, I don't write for womags, but I do like a challenge. How about this:

Yet. Such a little word, but Jenny was sick of it. If they couldn't afford to move house, then they couldn't. Why did David always have to finish those conversations with 'yet'? "We can't afford a bigger mortgage yet." "We can't afford to relax about the bills yet." "I can't afford to buy a car yet."

It was as if he couldn't bring himself to tell her the truth: that his job at the printworks was going nowhere, and hers at the supermarket had never had any prospects at all. Why did he thing that "yet" was better than "never"? It kept hopes going, that were never going to be fulfilled.

Emma

Well, I said you'd have to be clever about it!

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Actually I don't know why I wrote that about not being able to start a sentence with Yet in a womag story. I need to think first and speak second not the other way about.

Well, mine's a trick really. On the old principle that if you've got to do something odd, do it louder... 'yet' isn't really working in a normal way, which is what you meant, I think.

I agree that because we've lost the sort of sentence-structures that would make such a sentence sound natural, it's hard to imagine a womag story starting like that.

Actually it's not! I love Carol Shield's "Unless" where every chapter is entitled with an odd conjunction.

Hey Andy, I got an example in the book: my current read, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler question. Page no. 28, second para, after line 4; Anyone watching might have taken him for an inmate of an institution, a prisoner or a madman, desperately to get out. But there was another interpretation of his demeanour: he could have been desperate to get in.

Perhaps Our EmmaD would teach us something more.