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And sorry for multiposting, but I believe threads/posts are not shown again as "updated" merely because of editing.
I think it is funny that you know so much about technical writing, but start a sentence with "And". I was taught that is a big no-no.
And I disagree. I see nothing wrong with it
, and it can improve the reading flow. For the three points I mentioned above I can provide explanations (mine, not necessarily the same as Knuth's).
1. Writing two symbols (that don't belong together in the same formula) next to each other is confusing because then the two formulas next to each other have no nice visual separation and might appear like one larger formula and you have to realize that it's two formulas and find where one ends and the other starts. A word in between helps to recognize them as separate right at first sight. Normal words like in this text are also written next to each other, but they're several symbols (letters) long without spaces and we know them, so recognizing them is easy.
2. Starting a sentence with a symbol is bad because most of the time you use lower case symbols which then violates the convention to start sentences upper case.
And if the sentence happens to start at the beginning of the line or even page, you have to know or look at the previous line or page to see where the sentence begins.
18. Ideally text is just words. We don't speak symbols. Try saying "2000". You'll say "two thousand" (or equivalent in languages other than English). Try saying "x > 5". That's "x is greater than 5". The reason numbers are not written as words is when you really mean the number like Knuth explains, or if they're large because then writing it as a word would be cumbersome to read and write.
So... can you explain why starting a sentence with "And" is a big no-no? I don't follow rules unless they make sense, serve a purpose. There's also this annoying convention where scientific authors use "we" instead of "I", even in cases where "we" is flat out wrong. Ugh.
Btw, the highlighted "And" above is an example where leaving it out would be wrong because that would alter the meaning of the sentence it starts (instead of adding another point, it'd appear to try to explain the previous sentence). The preceding period could be changed to a comma and the "And" turned into lower case, but that would make the combined sentence unnecessarily long and combine two points that don't rely on each other and should be presented clearly separated. I guess I could rewrite the second sentence, but I really don't want to. Or I could start it with "Also, ", but that would introduce an unpleasant pause.
