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Negation as sentence openers: Although negatives make excellent sentence openers, they may also be used as transitions, connectives, and also as the basis for developing comparison and contrast. Novice writers often ignore this wonderful tool that professional writers employ to their advantage.

What follows is a series of examples that I have collected, but by no means do they constitute a complete list:

Unwilling to meet the clerk’s eyes, she scanned the meager pile of supplies she’d put into her shopping basket: five tubes of paint, three of the shades of blue (John Saul, The Right Hand of Evil, 11).

Unlike the listener to Homer or the reader of Dante, who listens or reads so as to have reaffirmed the order of things, how things are, this reader [Cervantes’ reader] is imagined as turning the pages of a printed book in the solitude of his or her own room, simply in order to pass the time (Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? 29).

Unlike today’s corporate executive, however, who has scrupulously acquired the rhetoric of consensus and multiculturalism, Fish is an old-style, free-booting captain of industry who has no intention of clasping both of your hand earnestly in his and asking whether you feel comfortable with being fired (Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, 171).

Not that Cora kept track of the days anymore, for each day was just like the day that had gone before, and would be just like the day that was to come (John Saul, The Right Hand of Evil, 16).

Not that Jared bore the bulk of most football players; at nearly sixteen, with only 160 pounds on his six-foot frame, he was considerably smaller and lighter than most of his teammates (John Saul, The Right Hand of Evil, 27).

Rather than narrowing, the road widened as it came into St. Albans, and became a boulevard with a broad median strip separating the two lanes (John Saul, The Right Hand of Evil, 36).

Rather than putting the reader in direct contact with the event it describes, this sentence filters the event though layers of reflection (Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence, 49).

Rather than indicating the logical progression of thought, connectives such as “thus” and “so” are just place markers; “but” and ‘and” are the words that carry the experience forward, the first signaling a thought going in a new direction, the second saying “and, oh, this has just occurred to me” (Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence, 62).

Instead of voicing even one of them [questions]; she slowly turned around and looked back at the immense derelict of a house that had sat abandoned for the last forty years (John Saul, The Right Hand of Evil 55).

Never ask your friend for anything that is not right, and never do anything for them yourself unless it is right (Cicero, On the Good Life 200).

Never before had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting (Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent 308).

Never was pessimism so gaily argued; never was man made to laugh so nearly while learning that this is a world of woe. And seldom has a story been told with such simple and hidden art; it is pure narrative and dialogue; no descriptions pad it out; and the action is riotously rapid (Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy 173).

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