why

[butterfly610]

Hmmm...no option to quote text in Tapatalk HD...interesting.
I don't know why you thought that would chap my cushions. The writer and I largely agree. Forex:
Pitchfork is an outlier in this regard. That is, the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is; they read plenty of Facebook posts and IMs that make these same sorts of mistakes.
IOW, they're (rhymes with trucking) stupid slackers whose idea of literature is Reddit or 4Chan, who can't tell the difference between lose/loose, a/an, then/than, etc., literally first grade stuff. Really, didn't you know the difference between those in first grade? But the idiots who put punctuation outside of the quotation marks don't.
The Oxford comma thing was one of those deals like my taxonomy example or de-planetizing Pluto (and, now, like punctuation outside of quotation marks). Everybody knew the right way a few decades ago; our grandparents knew the Oxford comma belongs where it does and that punctuation always goes inside quotation marks.

But today, we're smart.

When it comes to English grammar rules, many grammarians still considered it unacceptable to start a sentence with and, but or because. In their opinion, doing so creates a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. "And," "but" and "because" are used primarily to join two independent phrases together and create a relationship between them.

 

[AMonger]

When it comes to English grammar rules, many grammarians still considered it unacceptable to start a sentence with and, but or because. In their opinion, doing so creates a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. "And," "but" and "because" are used primarily to join two independent phrases together and create a relationship between them.

I forget the exception to that. I used to know it.
It's similar to the "up-with-which-I-will-not-put" exception to the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition.

 

[Turtle]

But, beginning a sentence in that manner is a useful writing tool to highlight or emphasize a particular point.

And, it can often do a better job at it than more formal conjunctions.

A sentence beginning with and or but will tend to draw attention to itself and its transitional function. Writers should examine such sentences with two questions in mind: (1) would the sentence and paragraph function just as well without the initial conjunction? (2) should the sentence in question be connected to the previous sentence? If the initial conjunction still seems appropriate, use it.

R.W. Burchfield, the editor of Fowler's New Modern English Usage and the director of the Oxford University Press, notes about the use of and: "There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with And, but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. An initial And is a useful aid to writers as the narrative continues."

The big deal about beginning sentences with conjunctions was started not by grammarians but by English teachers back in the late 50s or early 60s who were trying to encourage their students to form complex sentences. By not allowing the use of conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence, students were forced to think about their writing and not simply string together a series of simple clauses.