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’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 30 of the 31-day challenge. It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about. Join in!
