The other day I wrote this blog post about starting a sentence with “so.” That post was prompted by a Facebook posting by Stephanie West Allen, who now has followed up with her own interesting blog post on the same subject. Stephanie’s post features a link to a New York Times article and some thoughts on the subject by George Gopen.
Of course any good thing can be overdone. If you’re starting every other sentence with “so,” you may need to question your usage of it and impose a self-discipline of avoiding “so” as a sentence starter. But I hope this awareness doesn’t evolve into a superstition against this usage, like those against starting a sentence with a conjunction or ending it with a preposition. Around here, our official position remains that any word, no matter its part of speech, can be the first (or last) word in a sentence. “So,” as a conjunction or an adverb, can be the first word in a sentence. Just don’t overdo it.
Comments