Because grammar is a mutable beast, I must ask this question.

October 7, 2014 7:18 AM

My junior college (community college) composition students think I'm nuts because I claim it is not wrong to start a sentence with because. a) Who's right and b) What's the origination of the confusion?

One of my students claims that this comes from teaching for the PSSA, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why the PSSA would claim this is the rule. Or maybe I'm totally ignorant? Oh hope me, dears readers of ask me.

posted by angrycat to Writing & Language (27 answers total)

"Because" is a conjunction and as such is used to join two clauses, which is why you're not supposed to use it at the beginning of a sentence. But here's a good explanation:

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/can-you-start-a-sentence-with-because:

"False. It's OK to start a sentence with "because"; you just have to make sure you're writing complete sentences and not sentence fragments.

"Because" heads up subordinate clauses, which means if you have a clause that starts with "because," you must also have a main clause in your sentence. A main clause is something that could be a complete sentence by itself. The main clause can come first or last; if it comes last, you need a comma."
posted by GuyZero at 7:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

Is this confusion actually about dependent and independent clauses on their part? If a sentence has to be or contain an independent clause, then a dependent clause (that could start with because) is not a sentence.

Not a sentence: "Because of the acorns."

A sentence: "Because of the acorns, we had to park in the carport or risk dings on the roof of the Cadillac Escalade."

You totally know this I'm sure, but here's a helpful page you could refer them to on the difference: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/01/.

Otherwise I'm as stumped as you are and have also taught compisition (but not by any special Pennsylvania rules!)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [8 favorites]

Best answer: It's number eight on this list of rules that you can forget.
posted by The Bellman at 7:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [7 favorites]

"Because" introduces a subordinate clause that should not stand on its own. It's fine to invert the subordinate and main clauses ("Because it is cloudy, I think it will rain later" = "I think it will rain later because it is cloudy"). It's technically not correct to have the subordinate clause on its own ("Because it is cloudy."); that's a fragment.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 7:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

Best answer: My go-to source for questions like this is Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which often includes a detailed history of incorrect guidance. Unfortunately, it does have the source of this myth, but it does report a 1979 survey that found that 75 percent of surveyed college freshman "said they had been told never to begin a sentence with because. This rule is a myth." So your students are typical.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:25 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Because the night belongs to lovers. Incomplete sentence

Because the world is round, it turns me on. Complete sentence.
posted by ian1977 at 7:32 AM on October 7, 2014 [28 favorites]

Best answer: From Steven Pinker's Column last week in the Guardian: (There was a metafilter post linking to it)

"Many children are taught that it is ungrammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction. That's because teachers need a simple way to teach them how to break sentences, so they tell them that sentences beginning with "and" and other conjunctions are ungrammatical. Whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a conjunction. "And", "but" and "so" are indispensable in linking individual sentences into a coherent passage, and they may be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence. The conjunction "because" can also happily sit at the beginning of a sentence. Most commonly it ends up there when it introduces an explanation that has been preposed in front of a main clause, as in: "Because you're mine, I walk the line." But it can also kick off a single clause when the clause serves as the answer to a why question: "'Why can't I have a pony?' 'Because I said so.'""
posted by guy72277 at 7:32 AM on October 7, 2014 [22 favorites]

I was also taught this in school. I assume it's simply easier to teach students just to not start a sentence with 'because' than it is to explain when you can do it, and why. I've read enough student writing to guess that the times when 'because' is incorrectly used to begin a sentence greatly outnumber the times when the sentence would be improved by placing the subordinate clause first.
posted by lwb at 7:34 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Oh, this is so sad. Because it's time consuming to teach all of English grammar, teachers are being forced to teach a simplified set of rules. Students are being taught to avoid errors rather than to communicate with control and full expression.

There are two types of conjunctions: coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions. "Because" is the latter type. (See what I did there? It's another way to start a sentence with "because"! You could also have pedantic annoying students like I was!)

(I looked for a link for coordinating conjunctions, but three different pages about coordinating conjunctions left out the comma before the second part of a compound sentence. Geez.)

I wonder if teachers are teaching this in part because of the new "Because the Internet"-type structure that's become popular yet still grammatically incorrect.
posted by amtho at 7:44 AM on October 7, 2014 [9 favorites]

Write this on the board before class next time:

Because college kids don't know everything, grown-ups are hired to teach.

That ought to settle things. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 7:49 AM on October 7, 2014 [21 favorites]

I was initially (elementary through junior high) taught not to start sentences with "because". But I was definitely also taught by a high school composition teacher that it is sometimes ok.

I look at it like how kids are taught about the structure of the atom. Yeah, the solar system model is wrong, but wave functions and electron clouds are a little more advanced than a Grade 6 science teacher wants to get into while explaining how hydrogen and oxygen make water.

I would bet, OP, that your current students just never had a teacher who had the time/patience to explain why the inverted subordinate is ok, and whatever teaching standards they were teaching to just focused on avoiding fragments by avoiding the biggest pitfalls. Now it's your job to show them the light!
posted by sparklemotion at 8:03 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

OP, the title of the post is an example of a grammatically correct usage of "because" at the start of a sentence.
posted by alms at 8:06 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the solar system model is wrong, but wave functions and electron clouds are a little more advanced than a Grade 6 science teacher wants to get into while explaining how hydrogen and oxygen make water.

I think that's a bad analogy. The solar system model is a model -- a way of thinking about something -- and is taught as such, not as a literal representation of what you would see if you shrank down and observed an atom. Models aren't right or wrong so much as they are useful or not useful in understanding something. If this model is useful for understanding those aspects of atoms that students are expected to know, then they're useful, not "wrong." When students need to know more, you say "But that doesn't help us understand Y, so here's another way of thinking about it" and give them another model."

"Don't start a sentence with because" isn't a model, it' just a rule that is wrong.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

This has come up every semester I've taught English to recent (and not so recent) high school grads. To head it off at the pass, I teach them about dependent and independent clauses, and then they have a better understanding of what their former teachers were trying to get then to avoid. The problem is, it's time consuming to teach kids about dependent and independent clauses/sentence structure, so most of my students are hearing it for the first time. Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time trying to debunk weird "rules" my students were taught because it was expedient or their teachers were ignorant.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:25 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: thanks all
i've taught about dependent and independent clauses, and I asked the students specifically if they had been taught not to do as I did in the title of the post, that is, begin with a dependent clause and link it to an independent clause. the students were like, no, we were taught never to start with because, ever.

the same session a student said he was taught to use only one comma per sentence. i was like, where is this strange educational universe where these mysterious rules exist. i guess the answer is in the Upper Darby and Philly public schools, that's where.
posted by angrycat at 8:32 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

My junior college (community college) composition students think . . .

. . . that the principles, guidelines, and best practices they were taught as children are rules.

Part of the job you have undertaken, the job of anyone teaching undergraduates, is to help them transition from how to learn as a child to how to learn as an adult.

Childhood is full of rules and getting in trouble for violating them. There are good reasons for this.

First, grammar is logically prior to rhetoric. You need to understand these fundamentals of sentence structure as building blocks when you're ready to advance to higher levels of abstraction. Any k-12 teacher who isn't reinforcing these fundamentals in not doing their job.

Second, children (in general) by definition lack the maturity to understand what counts as excellence, quality, and creativity at higher levels of abstraction. And also the risks and benefits inherent in same.

You on the other hand are teaching young adults how to write in the real world. We're not diagramming sentences for grades out here, we're communicating ideas to specific audiences.

The gold standard here -- in government, in the military, in academia, in the workplace, in the arts -- is clarity of expression, not correctness in rule-following.

Another way of putting it is that in the adult world, the imperatives of rhetoric supercede those of grammar.

Check this out:

Don’t Be Bound by Rules

Many writers lose effectiveness because they stick unflinchingly to formal rules. Some of the things you probably learned as rules, however, are just silly taboos.

For example, you probably learned that you may not repeat words. Of course you may; it is far better than seeking synonyms. And you probably learned that you may not begin sentences with “and” or “but.” But you may. The best and most dignified of writers have been doing it for centuries. The alternatives are long, smooth sentences or short, disjointed ones; what can be wrong with short, smooth ones? You may even use sentences that are grammatically incomplete; if you’re skillful enough. Occasionally, anyhow.

This is not to suggest that good grammar is no longer important. But grammar need not conflict with clarity. (The taboos in the paragraph above have never been rules, even though you may have learned they were).

Each of us can communicate better if we remind ourselves occasionally that language is just a transportation system for ideas—nothing more. That is the only reason any culture ever created language. It is the only reason we write.

- Albert M. Joseph, Industrial Writing Institute


There is no game, no rule book, and no final authority. We all participate in determining what is acceptable practice in written communication.
posted by Herodios at 8:50 AM on October 7, 2014 [12 favorites]

The students were like, no, we were taught never to start with because, ever.

Younger and unexperienced students often get taught some minimalistic bogus-rules, in order to prevent them from getting confused and mess things up even more than usually when writing their first buncha papers.
Because there is a true and proven risk that students write incomplete sentences starting with "because," a teacher may find it safer to discourage them from starting a sentence with "because" at all.
Of course, whether it's elegant to use "because" at the beginning of sentences [or "of course", for that matter] is a whole 'nother bag of fries.

Comma rules: perhaps some, uh, Upper Darby and Philly public school(s) teachers aren't really up to the task of keeping track among the various [comma] confusing [no comma] comma rules out there. One comma per sentence is statistically safest: it demonstrates basic braveness without involving too much foot in the mouth. It can, go pretty horribly wrong however.
posted by Namlit at 9:28 AM on October 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

Herodios is my new writing hero. +1million.
posted by JimN2TAW at 10:18 AM on October 7, 2014

73, OM.
posted by Herodios at 10:22 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The core rule of sentences is that you need both a subject and a verb.

This is perfectly fine as a sentence:

"Because of the bad weather, our picnic was postponed."

"Because", there, is part of a dependent clause which is added to the core subject and verb of the sentence.

This, however, is not a complete sentence:

"Because of the bad weather."

There's no verb in that sentence, and thus no sentence.

The "never start a sentence with..." stuff is for elementary school students who have not yet been taught about clauses or sentence structure. It's just a quick shorthand "your sentence might not be a complete sentence if..." sort of guideline, not a hard and fast rule.
posted by Sara C. at 10:47 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

This, however, is not a complete sentence:

"Because of the bad weather."

There's no verb in that sentence, and thus no sentence.

Yes, but. There's another twist here, which is that in conversation it is possible to have complete moves which are not complete clauses. So a conversation like this is perfectly grammatical.

A: Why didn't John go to the cookout?
B: Because of the bad weather.

And there are situations in written prose that mirror this — where the author basically acts out both sides of a conversation.

When John didn't show up for the cookout, some people started to question his commitment to the organization. But I happen to know that John played a huge role in planning the event. So why didn't he go? Because of the bad weather. Does that make him a bad person? No, just practical.

You could, of course, rephrase those incomplete clauses to be a complete ones, with a subject and verb. But it would be overkill to insist that you have to.
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:05 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

in conversation it is possible to have complete moves which are not complete clauses. So a conversation like this is perfectly grammatical felicitious.

Because the imperatives of dialectic supersede the imperatives of both rhetoric and grammar.

See also, Austin, Grice, Searle, etc.
 
posted by Herodios at 11:24 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

If you need another source backing up the arguments above, the Chicago Manual of Style just addressed this very question in its October Q&A.
posted by teditrix at 12:27 PM on October 7, 2014

in conversation it is possible

In conversation it is possible to say anything you want, and as long as you're understood by the person you're speaking with, whatever you said was perfectly correct. If I say "sup" and you say "nmuch bro", we just had a grammatically perfect conversation. But once we start writing things down, there are like rules and stuff. And one of those rules is "sentences need a subject and a verb."
posted by Sara C. at 12:32 PM on October 7, 2014

> But once we start writing things down, there are like rules and stuff. And one of those rules is "sentences need a subject and a verb."

Those "rules" are not handed down on graven tablets, they are made up and enforced by (usually ignorant) teachers. There is no inherent definition of a sentence, and "sentences need a subject and a verb" is absurdly simplistic. English grammar, like the grammar of any natural language, is complicated and cannot be boiled down into simplistic bits of word-kibble. I suggest reading Geoffrey K. Pullum (who literally wrote, or cowrote, one of the foundational works of English grammar); he's very good on this sort of stuff, e.g. in his latest Lingua Franca column, Dumb Writing Advice, Part 2: Yielding to Nitwits:

Those who teach that well-crafted English prose has no sentence-initial coordinators are teaching a lie, as every admired work of literature you fetch down from your shelf will confirm. [...]

Maddox brushes such facts aside. “Every craft demands that beginners learn in stages,” she maintains; there is “pedagogical usefulness” to a rule telling beginning writers not to begin a sentence with a coordinator, because novice writers “don’t need to have all the rules and exceptions dumped on them at the outset.”

Yet this implied burden of “rules and exceptions” is nonexistent. Nothing has ever banned coordinators from independent clauses. Yes, there are rules; for example, coordinators are prefixed in English, rather than suffixed as in Japanese. An independent clause like And I agreed complies with that rule (the and is at the beginning where it should be), and with every other genuine syntactic rule of English. The sentence is just as grammatical as I agreed.

When should a sentence begin with a particular coordinator? When it gives you the shade of meaning you need.

(Yes, I know "because" isn't a coordinator; the relevance should be clear.)
posted by languagehat at 12:55 PM on October 7, 2014 [7 favorites]

In conversation it is possible to say anything you want, and as long as you're understood by the person you're speaking with, whatever you said was perfectly correct. If I say "sup" and you say "nmuch bro", we just had a grammatically perfect conversation. But once we start writing things down, there are like rules and stuff. And one of those rules is "sentences need a subject and a verb."

I'm not denying that there are rules in writing, or claiming that anything that's appropriate in conversation is automatically appropriate in any other medium.

But some conversational patterns do also occur in writing. And that particular conversational pattern — "Why? Because of NOUN" — is one of them. There may be a general tendency to avoid "because of NOUN" in formal edited writing. But that tendency is much weaker after a rhetorical question, because one thing authors often do after asking a rhetorical question is answer it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:39 PM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Part of the reason kids are taught not to begin a sentence with "because" is all the grammar stuff noted above. The other part is to encourage them to produce more meaningful responses on tests that ask for answers in the form of a sentence or two.

"Because it is not good grammar to begin a sentence that way."

"Teachers discourage sentences that begin with 'because' to push students to produce grammatically correct and more meaningful test responses."
posted by notyou at 6:03 PM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]