Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2011

Well, I'm not sure if William Safire would agree.
See the pages around this one:
--
Language maven strikes again
William Safire - 2011 - Preview

Not every language authority agrees with me on this mild approval of
_However_ to start a sentence, however. “Strunk and White discourage
the use of _however_ as a conjunctive adverb at the beginning of a
sentence,” writes Leslie Brisman, ...

http://tinyurl.com/6my3x4c
---

Marius Hancu

Poor style?  Really?  I'm much surprised(*) to hear you say so.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html
contains five instances of sentences starting with "However".  All
occur in discussions of other non-errors. Starting a sentence with
"however" isn't considered enough of a pseudo-error to rate a
mention; but "Beginning a sentence with a conjunction" is listed.

Maybe you are following Strunk and White in this?  Hacker's Rules for
Writers at
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/rules5e/subpages_language/however.htm
l
mentions S&W but gives "Kristin had always trounced Ed at chess.
However, now that he had improved his game through several months of
practice with an expert, Ed was confident he would win." I don't
think that would be improved by merging the two sentences into one
with a semicolon.

Grammar Girl also has no problem with "however" at the start of a
sentence:
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/starting-a-sentence-with-
however.aspx

Nor, as you may have guessed by now, do I.  What about it causes you
to label it as poor style or worse?

(*) Or, as we say nowadays, "very surprised"

WIWAL this was precisely what the "rule" forbade: starting a sentence
with "and" or "but" (for the stated reason that a conjunction should
not be separated from the clauses it was joining).

I've always assumed that those who forbid "however" do so in the
mistaken view that it's just another conjunction that means "but". I
can't see any more grammatical justification for disallowing "however"
than I can for "on the other hand", "consequently", "suddenly" or
"every day". If anything I would be inclined to advise a writer who
began a sentence with "but" to change it to "however".

Now, I don't set too much store by most of the rules I was taught at
school - the 70s and 80s were not a golden era for English teaching in
the UK - but I'm still taken aback to find myself in diametric
opposition to Eric on this.

Mark

 People feel all sorts of things.

 Sometimes this is good advice -- certainly in case of these examples
about people hating dogs -- sometimes not. In

 A natural idea that immediately suggests itself is to start with a
 theory T, and consider the transfinite sequence of theories given by

          T(0) = T,
          T(alpha+1) = T(alpha) + Con(T(alpha))
          T(lambda) = union of T(alpha) for alpha < lambda for limit
          lambda

 However, as soon as we try to spell out this definition in full
 detail, we find that in order for T(alpha+1) to be well-defined we
 need some arithmetical definition of T(alpha).

for example I don't think it's at all clear using "but" would be a
stylistic improvement.