Grammar Lesson of the Day: because

Grammar Lesson of the Day: because.

Some years ago I began to notice that my college freshmen had all gotten a very strange idea.  They had been taught that one must never begin a sentence with the word because.  I have no idea where high school teachers came up with this one.  It is like alligators in the Manhattan sewers, or aliens landing in Roswell.  Some kook huddled in a condemned building says it, and all at once everybody “knows” it, though it is not in the slightest bit true.

There’s nothing special about the word because.  It’s a subordinating conjunction, like a hundred others.  Any of them may begin a sentence – so long as it’s a sentence they are beginning.  A sentence, whether it begins with because or if or since or although or whenever or while or whatever or whatever, requires a main clause.  This is not a sentence:

Because I could not stop for death.

But it’s because it lacks a main clause.  Let Emily Dickinson supply one:


The “rule” that the teachers have promulgated, besides being in itself utterly absurd, reveals something about all the other grammatical rules and “rules” that our students learn (or “learn”).  That is, since grammar is no longer taught systematically, as a coherent discipline that makes sense of how we make sense, it disintegrates into a set of arbitrary directives, some of them incorrect at that, each separate from the other, without rhyme or reason.  It is why I say that, unless they’ve studied Latin or German, none of my college freshmen has been taught grammar. 

In any case, why would you want to begin with because?  Well, you might want to emphasize the main clause, leaving it to the end, if that contains the idea you are going to develop.  That’s what Emily Dickinson wanted to do; she wanted to focus on Death’s stopping by to give her a ride.  But maybe you want to emphasize the material in the subordinate clause.  Then you will probably place it after the main clause:

We’re off to see the Wizard,
The wonderful Wizard of Oz!
We hear he is a whiz of a wiz
If ever a wiz there was!
If ever if ever a wiz there was
The Wizard of Oz is one because
Because because because because because –
Because of the wonderful things he does!
We’re off to see the Wizard,
The wonderful Wizard of Oz!

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  • Jamie

    Could this be a lack of trust on the part of the professors? I was once told by a pediatrician (no longer our pediatrician) not to kiss my baby’s face. As if I could stop. I’m sure she meant “please don’t kiss your baby’s face if you have pneumonia, or if you have crumbs in your mustache, or if you have just inhaled cigarette smoke.” But she can’t trust a non-professional bumbling mother or father to understand all the exceptions, so to be safe, she just laid down the law for all time. I imagine that professors find it easier to say “don’t start a sentence with because, alright?” than to explain what a sentence fragment is.

    • Tony

      I don’t think so, Jamie. It isn’t professors who gave out that advice, but schoolteachers. I think they do not know what they are talking about. It’s just flat ignorance.

  • Nancy de Flon

    Tony, part of the problem is that not only has none of your freshmen been taught grammar, but also, if you consider the age of many high school and elementary school teachers, they have probably not taught grammar either. We have a situation parallel to that in the Church in which religious ed is being taught to kids by uncatechized catechists. We are hurtling toward a cultural Dark Age.

  • Victor Gallerano

    It seems to me that there is less here than meets the eye: Our fourth graders are taught that they should not begin a sentence with because because they are just coming to terms with simple sentences. Subordination of clauses is too abstract to make sense at that level. In 6th and 7th grade, we correct that notion. “We are moving on, class, now you are able to understand why and how to use a subordinate clause (whether begun by because or some other subordinate conjunction). In the late 7th and 8th grades we teach the various rhetorical values of the syntactical choices one makes in writing.
    I can’t speak for “all” your freshmen (really???) but, perhaps some of them weren’t listening in the 6th grade when we corrected the because rule. (Has their listening gotten any better, by the way?)
    At any rate, this level of grammar is appropriate to grammar, not high school. The only time grammar is taught “systematically” in high school is during 9th grade when they are trying to re-mediate any gaps or weaknesses in the new freshmen. Needless to say, 9th grade goes to the low-man on the teaching totem pole…and usually the one with gaps and weaknesses of his or her own.

  • http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/ Manny

    “why would you want to begin with because? Well, you might want to emphasize the main clause”
    Actually it emphasizes both clauses becuase it inverts the normal sequence. It gives the entire sentence a charge. If anything the first half of the Dickenson line is what’s memorable to me, “Because i could not stop for death…” If she had gone with the normal sequence niether halves would be memorable.

  • http://www.politickles.com/blog F.R. Duplantier

    Why am I responding to this article? Because I want to. And that’s a perfectly grammatical, if elliptical sentence. The rules of grammar are intended for people who have no idea what they’re doing, to help them make a better impression and avoid embarrassing themselves too much. They’re like paint-by-number canvases or Arthur Murray dance lessons. No one who’s any good at anything pores over rule books.