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Use of "however"? (Sentence adverbs and metadiscourse)
Subject:Use of "however"? (Sentence adverbs and metadiscourse) From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Nov 2000 13:12:39 -0500
Mike reports <<Someone who edited one of my documents recently told me that
it is inproper usage to begin a sentence with the word "However.">>
The use of "however" and other "sentence adverbs" such as "therefore",
"thus", and "nonetheless" (hope I've got my grammer jargon correct) isn't a
matter of grammatical correctness, but rather a matter of adherence to a
specific style. Editors who prefer not to use sentence adverbs ("However, X
is important") are usually willing to consider the words in a different form
(e.g., "X, however, is important" or "X is, however, important"). Since Eric
doesn't like strictly grammatical questions on techwr-l, I'll extend this
answer into technical communication practice, because it does have useful
implications for writing well:
There main reason for using a sentence adverb involves "metadiscourse", in
which you use words and sentence structures to alert the reader to the
relationships, includijng changes in focus, between sentences. For example,
I've started this sentence with "for example" to indicate that I'm done
discussing theory (defining metadiscourse in the previous sentence) and now
want to do something different, namely providing an example (this sentence)
to illustrate the point. You can also use this technique productively if
you're switching between talking about the good points to talking about the
bad points, to indicate that you're about to list exceptions, or that you're
changing the subject entirely. If you're not using "however" or other
sentence adverbs intentionally to achieve such a purpose, you should
reconsider whether the words actually add meaning or just add to the word
count.
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."--Goethe
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