Stop Starting So Many Sentences with Conjunctions

Your third-grade teacher told you not to start a sentence with “and.” Your third-grade teacher was wrong, says Bryan Garner, the legal writing guru.[1]

There’s no question that advocates and judges have listened. Pick up practically any brief by a writer between the ages of thirty and fifty—the right ages to have acculturated to the current practices in legal advocacy—or an opinion by a similarly young judge, and you’re likely to see each paragraph include at least one sentence starting with “and,” “but,” or “so.” Justice Kagan recently started nearly fifty sentences with “but” or “and” in a 25-page opinion, and Justice Gorsuch did it more than two dozen times in his 18-page concurrence.[2] Indeed, even UVA advocates it.[3] It’s become a legal writing cliché.

To be clear, I don’t believe there’s any rule in the English language against starting a sentence with a conjunction. I do it too, and it can be an effective technique. There are special reasons why Garner advocated it within the legal profession. Once upon a time, too many lawyers thought that violating the perceived rule against starting a sentence with a conjunction would compromise the formality of legal writing; Garner wanted to wean them off this habit. Conjunctions can create a conversational tone, break up overly long sentences, or control flow.

Whatever the benefits at one point in time, the pendulum has swung too far. The drumbeat of “and,” “and,” “and” is distracting at best. Where once it would have shortened unreadable run-on sentences, today it produces repetitively short, choppy, discontinuous sentences. That violates one of the most fundamental techniques for good writing: varying sentence length. At worst, it is outright misleading. I recently read an appellate case in which the court wrote (paraphrasing in case the author should ever influence my career), “the district court held that claim A failed. And claim B was barred.” Of course, we know what the court of appeals meant: The district court rejected both claims. Read literally, however, it seems to say that the district court rejected claim A and that, as an objective matter, claim B was barred. That’s unforgivable.

There’s another reason for this trend which, in my opinion, is less creditable. A pugnacious “but” is a technique associated with Garner’s coauthor, Justice Scalia. The Justice himself said that he “love[d] ‘but’ at the beginning of a sentence, and [he] never put ‘however’ at the beginning.”[4] No doubt the habit contributed to Scalia’s reputation for what are so-often called short, “punchy” sentences. Consciously or not, every lawyer who begins a sentence with a preposition hopes to ape Scalia’s admired style. I don’t share the admiration. Scalia was unquestionably a skillful writer, but in my view, his style was wholly inappropriate for a nonpartisan civil servant. The spread of his belligerent style undermines the civility of the bar and makes supposedly neutral judges write like the most zealous advocates.

There are divisions within the ranks. I consider Justice Thomas the most underrated writer on the Supreme Court (whatever one thinks of the content). Some time ago, various law professors criticized Thomas’s habit of putting a comma after each conjunction that opens a sentence[5]—as in, “But, the Constitution restricts the manner in which Congress may impose taxes.”[6] The point of using a conjunction is to “provide emphasis and immediacy,” wrote one blawgger, but the comma adds “a pause that is both unnatural and destructive of the admirable effect of the blunt opening.”[7] The great philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, meanwhile, supposedly inserted unnecessary commas into his writing so that readers would be forced to slow down and think through its claims. Do we want careful and thoughtful judges, or judges who try to overpower the reader with speed and force?

It’s not hard to find the source of so many writing problems. Lawyers like rules. They think the way to become a great writer is to emulate authority and apply the rules as mechanically as they can. That used to mean cutting every conjunction; maybe the only way to stop that was by teaching the opposite rule. But your third-grade teacher had a reason, too.

Author: Jason Vanger ’27, nnk2gn@virginia.edu

[1] Bryan A. Garner, LawProse Lesson #180: Conjunctions as sentence-starters, LawProse (Sep. 19, 2014), https://www.lawprose.org/lawprose-lesson-180-conjunctions-as-sentence-starters-2/.

[2] Joe Fore, 4 Tips to More Concise Legal Writing, UVA Lawyer (Spring 2021), https://www.law.virginia.edu/uvalawyer/spring-2021/article/4-tips-more-concise-legal-writing (discussing Sessions v. Dimaya, 584 U.S. 148 (2018)).

[3] Id.

[4] Bryan A. Garner, Interviews with United States Supreme Court Justices: Justice Antonin Scalia, 13 Scribes J. Leg. Writing 51, 60 (2010). Note the interviewer.

[5] E.g. Erik M. Jensen, A Comment on Justice Thomas’s Commas, 28 Green Bag 2d 99 (2025).

[6] Moore v. United States, 602 U.S. 572, 623 (2024) (Thomas, J., dissenting).

[7] Paul Horwitz, And, Erik Jensen is Dead Right, PrawfsBlawg (Jan. 2, 2026), https://prawfsblawg.com/and-erik-jensen-is-dead-right/.