It’s simple. If you are trying to choose whether to use but or however, choose the bold but over the weak, wimpy however – every single time. If I could choose just one topic in grammar where I could way a magic wand and have my way, it is this: the issue of using but
Subordinating conjunctions: what they do and how they differ from coordinating conjunctions In my post on coordinating conjunctions, I explained how that group of conjunctions joins shorter sentences together in a way that balances the two original sentences, leaving them of equal importance in the new sentence. Subordinating conjunctions also join shorter sentences into longer
Coordinating conjunctions What do coordinating conjunctions do? Conjunctions, as a group, are like road junctions: they are where sentences join. Coordinating conjunctions, one of the two categories of conjunctions, resemble an intersection with a roundabout; they join the roads in a way where all roads are equal. No way in or out of the roundabout
We’ve now finished our look at adverbs and move to a new part of speech, conjunctions. But before we continue, let’s just look back at what we’ve covered so far. We’ve looked at nouns, which can be thought of as containers of meaning, and pronouns, which substitute for nouns so that we don’t always have
In a word: yes. But there is a qualification: you shouldn’t do this too often. The reason is nothing to do with the words and and but themselves but with the group of words they grammatically belong to (coordinating conjunctions). As the name conjunctions suggests, the role of these words is to connect things and