{"id":777,"date":"2021-11-16T11:36:56","date_gmt":"2021-11-16T11:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/?p=777"},"modified":"2022-06-22T10:41:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T10:41:50","slug":"so-why-shouldnt-you-start-a-sentence-with-so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/articles\/so-why-shouldnt-you-start-a-sentence-with-so\/","title":{"rendered":"So why shouldn\u2019t you start a sentence with \u201cso\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What do the words \u201cso\u201d, \u201cand\u201d, \u201cbut\u201d and \u201cor\u201d have in common? They\u2019re all conjunctions, meaning they\u2019re used to connect parts of a<!--more--> sentence together, and they\u2019re all words you\u2019ve probably been told at some time that you shouldn\u2019t start a sentence with.<\/p>\n<p>A cursory glance around the web, however, quickly shows this to be stylistic preference rather than a hard and fast rule. Take a look at this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sport\/football\/58859225\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">soccer match report<\/a> on BBC Sport, where there are paragraphs beginning with \u201cand\u201d and \u201cbut\u201d. It\u2019s hardly an isolated example.<\/p>\n<p>Really, there\u2019s not a lot wrong with doing it, as long as it\u2019s done well and in a grammatically correct way. If done badly, it can result in fragments \u2013 sentences that don\u2019t make sense on their own as they refer back to the sentences before them. Examples of this could be:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cWe missed the train. So we went to the pub until the next one came.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cI thought I heard a knock at the door. But there was nobody there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Poor writing like this is the reason why some editors and grammarians discourage starting a sentence with a conjunction, and while we don\u2019t want to stifle snappy and inventive writing, we also tend to pass on this advice to writers in the interests of concision and consistency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do the words \u201cso\u201d, \u201cand\u201d, \u201cbut\u201d and \u201cor\u201d have in common? They\u2019re all conjunctions, meaning they\u2019re used to connect parts of a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-tips"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":779,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions\/779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordsofworth.org\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}