A Topic I’ve Been Meaning to Blog About, But Now Someone Took Care of It for Me

Sometimes procrastination pays off.

For over a year now, I’ve had an item on my to-do list for our blog: usage rules you can ignore. The idea being, if you’re a writer who knows what he’s doing, you don’t have to stick to every single rule they taught you back in high school. Some of those rules are silly, while others are just plain wrong.

Now Jan Freeman has written exactly what I meant to write (so I don’t have to). In “Un-Rules,” she explains 10 language laws that you can safely forget — starting with one that’s been a huge pet peeve of mind for ages:

“And” can start a sentence. So can But and However. One theory is that teachers ban the and opening for kids of Tooth Fairy age so they can’t just string together a series of “and then” sentences, thus planting the idea that it’s forbidden. But anyone old enough for Harry Potter should be able to handle the truth.

Here’s the full article. Thank you, Jan.