If they do it too much, they should be told not to do it at all
Yes, I know: stated so baldly, this zero-tolerance policy (ZT-1) sounds
extreme, not to mention unlikely to be effective unless constantly and
severely enforced. Nevertheless, advisers on style sometimes end
up following ZT-1, and also the related policy
ZT-2: If doing it sometimes gets them
in trouble, they should be told not to do it at all.
ZT-1 is one of the factors that leads to the proscription
Avoid
Passive; student writers use passive clauses more than their
teachers think they should, so they're told to avoid them wherever
possible. ZT-2 is one of the factors that leads to the
proscription
Avoid
Pronouns; student writers (well, actually, all writers)
occasionally produce sentences with unclear or incorrect pronominal
reference, so some teachers, remarkably, tell them not to use pronouns.
Recently it occurred to me that ZT-1 might be part of the history of
what I have come to call Garner's Rule (after Bryan Garner, who is its
most vigorous current exponent), proscribing sentence-initial linking
however, as in "You may bring paper
to the exam. However, you are allowed to bring only one page."
First, rather a lot of background about Garner's Rule. (And an
acknowledgment: what I'm saying here represents joint work by me and
Douglas Kenter.)
Garner gives a full statement of the rule in his 1999 book of advice
for legal writers,
The Winning Brief:
Don't use However to start a sentence: use But instead, move However inside the sentence, or
collapse the preceding sentence into an Although-clause. (p. 245)
Replacing
however by
but is what he recommends first
(and most often), so from here on I'll use "Garner's Rule" to refer to
the stronger form:
Don't use However to start a sentence: use But instead.
Garner's Rule has a long history, going back at least to -- wait for it
-- William Strunk Jr.'s 1918
Elements
of Style, which says (as Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum
noted
on
Language Log a while back) sternly and uncompromisingly:
However.
In the meaning nevertheless,
not to come first in its sentence or clause.
(The proscription is softened some in the later Strunk & White
version: "The word serves better when not in first position.")
Garner's
The Winning Brief assembles
advice from over a hundred years that variously recommends using
discourse connectives in general (certainly good advice), proscribes
sentence-initial
however,
explains this proscription, argues that there's nothing wrong with
beginning sentences with
but
(keep this in mind), and recommends a fix for sentence-initial linking
however (usually either replacement by
but or moving
however inside the sentence).
So you're asking: What's wrong with sentence-initial
however? Garner tells us, in
his 1998
Dictionary of Modern
American Usage, that it
isn't a grammatical error; it's merely
a stylistic lapse, the word But ordinarily
being much preferable... The reason is that However... is a ponderous way of
introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences. (p. 342)
The objection is aesthetic, a matter of personal taste and
judgment. Garner finds sentence-initial
however "ponderous" and
"unemphatic", and a number of other writers agree with him -- for
instance, Lucile Vaughan Payne, in her 1965
The Lively Art of Writing (cited by
Garner in
The Winning Brief),
who disarmingly admits that it's all rather mysterious:
A student writer will almost invariably
give however first position
in a sentence...But [this word] works best if it is inside the
sentence. Just exactly why this position is best is one of those
stylistic mysteries that can't really be explained. It simply
sounds better that way. And the importance of sound can't be
dismissed, even in silent reading. (pp. 85-6)
(Note the reference to student writers. I'll come back to that.)
However, still other writers have different tastes and (rightly) object
to having their judgments dismissed by airy assertions about what
sounds good, ponderous, or (un)emphatic. (I'm not much of a user
of sentence-initial
however
myself, as I noted in
an
earlier posting, but I see no reason to impose my personal style on
other people.)
Where do these aesthetic judgments come from? Mark and Geoff
suggested that Strunk's stylistic preferences came from the writing he
was exposed to as a young man. This makes sense; you develop your
sense of style from the models around you.
You also develop your sense of style from explicit teaching and
advice. Once a proscription against sentence-initial
however was articulated, it had a
life of its own and could be passed from one generation of writers and
teachers, in communities of stylistic practice, to the next. Like
other fashions in taste, it diffuses.
Is diffusion a sufficient explanation for the stylistic tastes of
Garner and others? Maybe so, but I can think of two other factors
that might contribute to a dispreference for sentence-initial
however. Before I discuss
them -- yes, we're going to get back to ZT-1 -- I want to take up, and
dismiss, another argument against sentence-initial linking
however that I've seen in net
discussions: that it introduces an ambiguity.
The argument goes as follows: when you read a sentence beginning with
however, or hear one, you don't
know whether this is linking
however
or concessive
however (as in
"However you got that dog, you can't keep it" or "However many times
you tell me that, I won't believe it"). So the sentence so far is
ambiguous. On the other hand, initial
but would be unambiguous. [Update: Bruce Rusk writes to point out that even this
but is (temporarily) ambiguous, thanks to the fact that there's an exclusionary prepositional idiom
but for 'if it weren't for the existence of', as in these contrasting pairs: "Writing well is not easy. But for grammarians it is impossible." (contrastive coordinating
but) vs. "Writing well is not easy. But for grammarians, it would be impossible." (exclusionary prepositional
but for). Potential ambiguity is everywhere.]
This is an extraordinarily silly argument. To start with, as long
as the writer is punctuating properly, sentence-initial linking
however is unambiguously signaled
by a following comma, and in speech it's usually associated with the
prosody that the written comma indicates. There's no ambiguity
even at the first word. Then, once you get past the first word,
any unsureness on your part as to which
however was intended is quickly
eliminated by the following material.
I believe that ambiguity-avoidance arguments for particular stylistic
choices are always flawed, but this one is particularly lame, since a
huge proportion of sentences begin with words whose identity can be
determined only when the sentence is continued: "he's" could be "he is"
or "he has", "that" could be a complementizer or a demonstrative, "is"
could be copular
be or the
be of the progressive or the
be of the passive, "later" could be
an adjective or an adverb, and so on, endlessly. If we objected
to this sort of local indeterminacy for a "however", we would be
objecting to almost everything.
Now to two considerations that actually might contribute to a feeling
against initial
however.
The first consideration is a kind of "division of labor" argument for
initial
but over
however. Here's how it goes:
1. The linker but occurs sentence-initially but
not sentence-internally.
2. The linker however
can occur in either place.
3. The labor of signaling contrast could then be divided between
the two linkers if however
was restricted to sentence-internal position: but only sentence-initially, however only sentence-internally.
Ok, class, where have we seen this argument before? Yes, in
Fowler's famous suggestion (we've now posted so much on the That Rule,
or as I now prefer to call it, Fowler's Rule, that I hardly know which
posting to link to, but here's
one
of my favorites) that the labor of signaling relative clauses might
be divided between
that and
which:
1. The relativizer that occurs in restrictive relative
clauses but not in nonrestrictive relative clauses.
2. The relativizer which
can occur in either place.
3. The labor of signaling relatives could then be divided between
the two relativizers if which
was restricted to nonrestrictive relative clauses: that only in restrictives, which only in nonrestrictives.
Perfectly parallel reasoning in the two cases. If you're the sort
of person who likes the division-of-labor argument for Fowler's Rule --
and a great many people do -- then you should also like that argument
for Garner's Rule. I've never really understood why anyone would
want to trade in variation for complementary distribution, so I don't
buy the argument in either of these cases (or any others). But
tastes evidently differ.
Finally, we get to ZT-1. Recall Payne's remark that student
writers (she means, for the most part, college student writers)
"invariably" put
however in
initial position. Other writing teachers have remarked to me that
their students are very fond of
however
as a discourse connective, in particular as a marker of contrast, and
that they almost always put it in initial position, and my own
experience teaching accords with these observations. We could, of
course, be wrong; possibly no one has studied the matter
systematically, just because everyone is pretty sure what the facts are.
In any case, there seems to be a general belief among writing teachers
that college students overuse initial
however.
This would lead them to be prejudiced against it and, in some cases, to
advise their students not to use it at all. That's an instance of
ZT-1.
I'll leave for a follow-up posting the question of why college students
might like the discourse connective
however
so much -- there's a delicious irony in there -- and why they prefer
it in initial position. If you are a college student yourself,
you might think about your own practice and the reasons for it.
If you have college students handy, you might ask them.
For now, I'll content myself with a few comments on zero tolerance
policies, in general and with respect to stylistic choices.
Zero tolerance policies can be found many places: Alcoholics Anonymous
and school drug policies, for example. They require enforcement,
either informal (AA) or institutionalized (school drug policies), and
it's not clear how effective they are in eliminating the targeted
behavior. In the case of stylistic choices, the goal should
really be not to eliminate one of the choices, but only to reduce its
use, either in sheer frequency (in favor of a greater variety of
choices) or in potentially problematic situations. ZT-1 and ZT-2
are overkill.
They are also almost surely ineffective, at least if the goal is to get
the students writing clear, smooth, interesting prose. One easy
response to a prohibition against initial
however is to follow the strong
form of Garner's Rule: whenever you find yourself tempted to begin a
sentence with linking
however,
replace it with
but.
The result is that overuse of
however
becomes overuse of
but.
To my mind, this is no advance (and I'm a big
but-user). Another easy
response is to just delete the
however,
thereby much reducing the number of explicit discourse connectives,
certainly not a result we want.
There are techniques that could be effective. A piano student
who's inclined to overuse the sustain pedal -- it can cover a lot of
finger sins -- might be told to play some pieces without the sustain
pedal, either a few times or for some period, after which the sustain
pedal is reintroduced. Similarly a sports player who's inclined
to favor one particular move very heavily might be told not to use it,
either for one practice or for some period, after which the ban is
lifted. The aim is to expand a repertoire.
This could easily be done in writing classes: not a lifetime ban on
initial
however, but a
short-term ban, during which alternatives are offered, perhaps even
required: "Your essay must have at least two occurrences of
sentence-initial
but, two of
sentence-internal
however,
and two occurrences of other discourse connectives". Writing
teachers already give assignments that make the students follow special
rules, requiring or prohibiting particular bits of form or content,
either in their own writing or in editing material provided by the
teacher. The discourse adverbial
however could easily be folded into
such assignments. (And probably has been, by teachers not totally
under the sway of Garner's Rule.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 31, 2006 03:18 PM