Can You Start a Sentence With But? Strunk Did It 15 Times

Documents of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1916. Among that year’s instructions to the city’s teachers sits a line about how a sentence may open: “Teach the elimination of but, so, and, because, at the beginning of a sentence.”

That is a municipal school board issuing a writing rule to its staff. Merriam-Webster files it alongside five similar orders reaching back to 1826, which is the honest answer to who banned this and when. And the two texts usually dragged into the argument are both online, both searchable, and both settle it against the rule.

Can you start a sentence with but?

Yes. Merriam-Webster answers the question directly: it has never been wrong to begin a sentence with and or but, and English writers have been doing it from the 9th-century Old English Chronicle through to the present day. The prohibition arrived far later, out of 19th- and early-20th-century schoolbooks and school boards.

The ban has a paper trail, and it is made of schoolbooks

Merriam-Webster collects six of these dated orders, running from 1826 to 1929, each naming the words a sentence may not lead with. Five of them:

Year	Source	The instruction
1826	James Brown, The American System of English Grammar	”Or never begins a sentence, paragraph, or chapter.”
1854	George Payn Quackenbos, An Advanced Course of Composition and Rhetoric	”A sentence should not commence with the conjunctions and, for, or however.”
1908	George Hitchcock, Sermon Composition	”Do not begin a sentence with also or likewise.”
1916	Documents of the School Committee of the City of Boston	”Teach the elimination of but, so, and, because, at the beginning of a sentence.”
1929	Jacob Cloyd Tressler, English in Action	”Do not begin a sentence with however or a similar unimportant word.”

Only one of the six names but, and it is the Boston school committee’s line to its teachers. The others police or, and, for, however, also and likewise, in whatever combination the author disliked. English drifts in both directions like this: a rule that sounds ancient turns out to carry a date, while a word as loose as “moment” was once a fixed 90 seconds.

The rule is not in The Elements of Style

Strunk’s Elements of Style carries his own copyright dates of 1918 and 1919 and reached the trade in the Harcourt, Brace edition of 1920. The full text is public domain and word-searchable as Project Gutenberg ebook 37134, and it contains no rule about where a conjunction may stand in a sentence.

There is a “But” entry. It covers three other things: but is “Unnecessary after doubt and help”; leaning on but produces the loose sentences he criticises under Rule 14; and “Particularly awkward is the following of one but by another.” Sentence position never comes up. His repair for the doubled but deletes the second one, which makes it a complaint about repetition.

Strunk opens 15 of his own sentences with But

Sentence-initial But turns up 19 times in the Gutenberg text. Set aside the quoted specimens, the exercise items and the transcriber’s notes, and Strunk’s own instructional prose still begins 15 sentences with the word. Three of them, verbatim:

• “But whether the interruption be slight or considerable, he must never insert one comma and omit the other.”
• “But a writer should be careful not to construct too many of his sentences after this pattern (see Rule 14).”
• “But this device, if too often used, would become a mannerism.”

Outside that count, two of the sentences he sets students to fix also open with But, in the exercise headed “Point out and correct the faults in the following sentences.” The opening cannot be the fault they are meant to find, because no rule in the book makes it one.

The 1959 Strunk and White, the edition most people mean when they blame the book, opens two consecutive sentences this way: “But since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.” Merriam-Webster quotes both lines.

The Constitution opens three sentences with But

Search the National Archives transcript and the count comes to three. One is in Article I, Section 7, on overriding a veto: “But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays.” The other two are in Article II, Section 1, inside the original machinery for choosing a President. Two further sentences open with And, in Article II and Article IV.

Wayne Schiess of the University of Texas School of Law puts the figure at seven. Counting capitalised sentence-initial But in the Archives transcript gives three, so three is the number used here.

The reason your teacher gave is labelled speculation

The familiar origin story says teachers banned sentence-initial and to stop children producing endless chains of clauses. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage reports that as speculation, not as documented history, and Merriam-Webster adds that changing how people naturally use the language seems an unlikely fix for run-on writing.

Both of the beliefs underneath the question are folklore, then: that English grammar contains such a rule, and that The Elements of Style is where it began. Origin stories of this shape attach themselves to almost any subject, sloths and their walking speed included, and they tend to be the least documented part of the account.

Overuse is the real fault, and Strunk gave it a number

The caution in Strunk that comes nearest to a rule is about frequency, not position. Rule 14, “Avoid a succession of loose sentences,” describes the writer who builds an entire paragraph from two-clause sentences hinged on and, but and so, and warns that a series of them “soon becomes monotonous and tedious.” That is a note about rhythm across a paragraph, and it holds whether the but sits at the front of a sentence or halfway through it.

Formality is the other live question. Schiess tells lawyers who think a sentence-initial but is too informal for legal writing that they are missing out on “a vigorous, forceful transition word.” Where a supervisor, a journal or a house style sheet forbids it, that is a local instruction of exactly the 1916 Boston kind, worth obeying in that building without mistaking it for the language. Police radio operators got a rule of their own in APCO’s 1967 manual, which calls “I am 10-4 on that information” incorrect, and everyday speech has outvoted that one as well.

No comma after it, and however is no safer

Schiess is blunt about the punctuation: if you want to begin a sentence with but, you need no comma after it. He cites Bryan A. Garner’s “On Beginning Sentences with But” in the Michigan Bar Journal of October 2003, and Supreme Court opinions doing it in 1793, 1901 and 2013.

Schiess’s own before-and-after pair offers however as the slower alternative, and Tressler’s 1929 schoolbook banned that word from sentence openings too, for being unimportant. Punctuation and usage lore keeps its names and rules long after the reasons go missing, which is also the story behind the name of the em dash.

The Boston school committee’s 1916 line is an instruction about what to teach, and it survived a century by being mistaken for a fact about English. Strunk, who never wrote the rule down, went on breaking it fifteen times inside the very book that gets blamed for it. Strictly FYI.