and in early trading in New York

In the above quotation, "But stocks still fell sharply in Asia and Europe", that is one thing; "and in early trading in New York" is another. "Early trading" does not include "Asia and Europe". Do I understand it correctly?

But stocks still fell sharply in Asia and Europe, and in early trading in New York,
before they recovered and closed essentially flat for the day on Wall Street.

Please note that, because this begins with a conjunction, to wit: " but " it is a sentence FRAGMENT.

It is not a sentence, nor is it a complete thought,
standing alone, by itself (which it is not).

In my opinion,
it is best not to express oneself in FRAGMENTS of sentences.

Initial coordinators in technical, academic, and formal writing
November 8, 2009 @ 11:04 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist Poppycock


Yesterday, I quoted someone writing on the nanowrimo forum ("Also, check the back seat", 11/7/2009), who offered an apparently irrefutable argument in favor of "No Initial Coordinators" (NIC), the zombie rule that forbids us to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but:

[Usage standards and grammar] are related but not identical. Grammar deals with categories such as parts of speech, and the logical rules of syntax for constructing sentences. Grammatically, conjunctions link words, phrases, or clauses. So from a grammatical standpoint, a sentence beginning with a conjunction is a fragment, and hence ungrammatical.

The lovely thing about this argument is the universality of its structure. We stipulate that the role of X is to perform functions A, B, or C; since D is not in our list, it follows logically that X cannot legitimately perform the function D. To add to its lustre, this particular instance of the argument is self-refuting as well as circular, since some expressions of the "No Initial Coordinators" pseudo-rule include so in the taboo list.

Having conceded that initial coordinators are in common use, despite being (in his opinion) deductively ungrammatical, our grammatical zombie offers this generalization:

Although beginning a sentence with a conjunction is acceptable in fiction (there is wide agreement on this), it is not acceptable in technical, academic, or formal writing.

If generations of Hollywood movies have taught us anything, it's that you can't reason with zombies. That's why yesterday's post quoted Zombieland rule #22, "When in doubt, know your way out". But zombie logic from self-appointed authorities often lures innocent youth into the clutches of the undead, so I'm going to devote a few minutes this morning to examining the facts of initial-conjunction usage, in the hopes of inoculating a few I. Y. against this particular strain of the zombie virus.

We're told that "beginning a sentence with a conjunction … is not acceptable in technical, academic, or formal writing". The implication is that in well-written and well-edited writing of the specified kind, sentence-initial conjunctions should be absent or at least very rare, rather like instances of ain't.

To find an example of "technical" writing, I turned to the most recent issue of one of the technical/scientific journals that I subscribe to, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and looked at the first article in the table of contents, Derek C. Bertilone et al., "Ultra-wide sensor arcs for low frequency sonar detection with a baffled cylindrical array", JASA 126(5): 107-111, November 2009. The first instance of allegedly unacceptable behavior comes at the start of the second sentence (emphasis added)

Passive cylindrical sonar arrays are operated over the widest possible frequency range to exploit all available acoustic energy. But it is a challenge to obtain acceptable performance at low frequencies due to high levels of ambient and platform-generated noises and poor bearing resolution

Clearly the American Institute of Physics, JASA's parent institution, remains free of this zombie virus.

OK, let's turn our attention to academic writing. Among the publications that I subscribe to, perhaps the most clearly "academic" one is The Chronicle of Higher Education, which advertises itself as "the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators". Since the main section of the Chronicle might be seen as too journalistic, I decided to turn to The Chronicle Review, a weekly insert that presents essays of a more formal and less journalistic character. In the most recent issue, the article that first caught my eye was Josh Fischman, "Global Warming Before Smokestacks" — where again, the first instance of "unacceptable" behavior comes at the start of the second sentence:

People have changed the planet's climate, warming the atmosphere by churning out greenhouse gases.

But that process didn't start during the Industrial Revolution. It began thousands of years ago, according to a controversial hypothesis, before anyone uttered the phrase "global warming."

Just to clarify that but is not the only coordinator that appears in sentence-initial position in such writing, a bit further along in the same essay we find

Within the past 10,000 years, humans began changing the planet, clearing land to grow food by cutting and burning forests. A map of archaeological sites shows signs of domesticated grains, and of cut-and-burned fields, that began 10,000 to 9,000 years ago in the Middle East. That practice spread north, east, and west until, by 5,700 years ago, it covered all of Europe and parts of Asia. And in Asia, by about 5,000 years ago, a good deal of land was cleared, flooded, and turned into rice paddies.

When I look around for an example of "formal" writing that's neither "technical" nor "academic", the first candidate in the array of books on my desk is Dwight MacDonald's collection of essays Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture. Opening it, I find that it begins with an Introduction by the arch-prescriptivist John Simon. The second paragraph of this essay includes the sequence

It is his uncompromising yet utterly accessible, jargon-free, lavishly bequeathed individuality that made Dwight the universal critic he was. And critic he was of everything he touched or was touched by.

Turning to MacDonald's own Preface, we need to read through to the third paragraph before finding an instance of an "unacceptable" sentence-initial coordinator:

Let it be admitted at once, as Dr. Edward Shils and other Panglosses of the sociological approach keep insisting, that mediocrity has always been the norm even in the greatest periods. This fact of life is obscured by another: when we look at the past, we see only the best works because they alone have survived. But the rise of masscult has introduced several new and confusing factors.

Could this "ungrammatical" licentiousness be a feature of earlier generations of intellectuals, a practice now purged from the formal writing of more sedate and serious modern thinkers? A bit further to the right on my desk, I find Richard Posner's recent A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression. The third paragraph of the first chapter begins

The flaw in this classical economic theory of the self-correcting business cycle is that not all prices are flexible; wages especially are not. This is not primarily because of union-negotiated or other employment contracts. Few private-sector employers are in the United States are unionized, and few non-unionized workers have a wage guaranteed by contract. But even when wages are flexible, employers generally prefer, when demand for their product drops, laying off workers to reducing wages.

In a later post, I'll take a look at the frequency of sentence-initial coordinators across genres and across time, and suggest what the results tell us about the causes and consequences of this zombie-virus strain.

November 8, 2009 @ 11:04 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist Poppycock

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1875