One writing rule that I have been taught my whole life is that you never start a sentence with the words “and”, “because”, and “but”. I have been taught this rule since I first started writing. It has just come to my knowledge recently, within the past few months that this rule is not always true. I always wondered why when I would read novels I would see sentences being started with these words. Naively, I thought that the authors were incorrect, that it wasn’t proper, or that it was “frowned upon”.
Because I used to teach middle school, I might be able to shed some light on why you were taught these rules. (It sounds like you understand why they aren’t actually “rules” already.)
1. Starting a sentence with “And”: When younger writers tell stories, they tend to write in all simple sentences and start almost every sentence with “and.” It gets really repetitive. Maybe you had teachers who just wanted to break the cycle. It also helps encourage students to try compound sentence constructions!
2. Starting a sentence with “But”: This is probably pretty similar. Also, it’s a good way to introduce other transition words and phrases that show contrast (like “on the other hand,” “although,” and “however”)! Plus, if students learn to use “although,” they can practice with complex sentence constructions.
3. Starting a sentence with “Because”: This gets into tricky grammatical stuff about independent and dependent/subordinate clauses. When students are young, it’s often easier to tell them not to start a sentence with “because” than to explain that you can, but only if an additional independent clause is added to the subordinate clause that results from the subordinating conjunction “because” being placed at the beginning of a sentence. 🙂