Many of you are teaching students to write. You should know that many professional writers are still learning to write, and some of them don’t know how to learn.
I’m not in the camp that thinks you can’t start a sentence with “And.” Whenever I write, I start many sentences with “And.” But when I revise, those “And”s are often cut. Too many of them make reading feel choppy, bouncy. “And” at the beginning of sentences are what I think of as “first draft writing.” “And” is only necessary when there’s some ambiguity about how the sentence is connected to the previous sentence.
Why am I going on about this? (When I first wrote that previous sentence, it started with “And” and I just deleted it.)
I almost wish I hadn’t. He did answer most of my questions, but he also restored many of my deleted “And”s. I started to restore some of them. I sent him e-mail explaining why I had cut them. I even sent him a couple of sentences in his piece, one an example where “And” should be cut, the other an example where the “And” was needed. Then I asked the staff copyeditors whether they had this problem with him, and they said “yes” and “yes” and “yes.”
I do wish I hadn’t been doing this work remotely. If we’d been able to talk F2F, perhaps I could have persuaded him to let those “And”s evaporate after he’d written them.
And good luck to all your writing teachers.
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I tend to start many of my sentences with And or But or Or, lol! I do go back and cut some, but it's become part of my style. It's interesting to hear about professional writers still learning how to write. When I taught writing, one of the hardest things for students to do was cut words, phrases, or sentences that didn't work. I see how one would get attached to a piece of writing. I've done it many times.
ReplyDeleteI can sense you wanting to pull your hair out dealing with all the ands.
ReplyDeleteyes, indeed. pulling out my hair, and wanting to strangle the writer.
DeleteAh, the copy editor's lot, which you capture her with sharp succinctness. I'm a fan of writer/editor Benjamin Dreyer who wears that hat, too, and I saved this quote from his book _Dreyer's English_, which feels appropriate to share now: "The role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct--indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor's notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author's vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself." Most ideals I can picture wouldn't be clotted with conjunctions, though that may be easier said than done, for some writers; and almost always easier said in person than through swapping digital artifacts!
ReplyDeleteWhen I first started teaching copy-editing many years ago, one of my early students succinctly summarized what I had been trying to explain as the copyeditor's task: Put yourself in the mind of the writer and then edit yourself. Dreyer is saying the same thing. That is tricky to learn and to do.
ReplyDelete