A Word, Please

When you want to know about treatment options for high blood pressure, you go to a doctor. When you want to know who ran the Underground Railroad during Civil War times, you go to an encyclopedia. When you want to know about a person's credit history, you go to a credit reporting agency.

But when you want to know whether you can start a sentence with a conjunction, you go to eight or 10 friends who don't know either, launch a big debate in which everyone puts in his two cents and you all go back and forth for hours. When you're done, you're no closer to an answer than you were when you started. But you probably think you are.

When I gave a talk about grammar at Portland's Wordstock Festival in April, an attendee shared a story about how a writing group she once took part in spent an entire session debating a single word in a script title: "whose." Some said it should have been "who's." Others made counterarguments. All of them pontificated about the difference. Then two hours were gone and they never got around to discussing the script. And they never figured out whether it should have been "whose" or "who's."

Type "grammar question" into any Internet search engine and you'll see the same thing. Posters on message boards go back and forth on what they think, what they believe, what they kindasorta recall from school ? but nobody ever opens a book.

Part of the reason is that there is no single answer book. There are lots of them. And they tend to disagree ? a lot. But most people don't even have the opportunity to be confused by competing style guides because they don't even know they exist. They think their only resource is some long-lost grammar text that they never read when they were in school anyway.

For example, I recently stumbled across a message board for novel writers. One member had asked whether it was OK to start sentences with conjunctions such as "and," "but" and "so." What followed, of course, was a free-for-all.

"I was always taught that you simply don't start a sentence with a conjunction."

"I think it's perfectly good grammar to start a sentence with a conjunction."

"You're technically not supposed to start a sentence with a conjunction. It's not grammatically correct. However, when writing for creative purposes it's really more of a style thing."

There were many posts of this nature, none of which offered any real help for the poor soul who posted the question.