An Apology to Bryan Garner

In a previous article, I argued that while it is appropriate to start a sentence with a conjunction, lawyers today do so too often for good style—a change that I traced to the activism of the legal writing expert Bryan Garner.[1] In response, the Law Weekly received an email from a retired partner at a Washington, D.C. law firm, who offered the following advice to us young lawyers: “What the F are these people talking about. And, never start a sentence with a conjunction. A conjunction conjoins two things. You cant [sic] conjoin if there is only one thing.” In my article, I recognized that Garner’s advice at one time may have been necessary to shake lawyers of the conviction that it is ungrammatical to start a sentence with a conjunction. I nevertheless thought that advice was no longer needed. But perhaps I underestimated how deeply the supposed convention is entrenched in the minds of an older generation.

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