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Can a sentence starting with "While, ..." be grammatically correct?

English Language & Usage Asked by user4883 on December 14, 2020

I have a colleague who often writes sentences in the form “While, [these circumstances would make X seem unlikely to be the case], [these other circumstances show that X is in fact the case].

For example: “While, it looks warm outside, there is actually a cold breeze so it is not warm at all.”

Or take this real life example: “While, the Ports Access Regime does not expressly stipulate that access can be provided on different terms and conditions, the mechanisms in the Regime support the commercial negotiation of individual access arrangements, and access on different terms and conditions is not precluded.”

Surely that is incorrect? One gets rid of the comma following the “While,” in all cases, correct?

3 Answers

You are correct; while should not have a comma after it in these situations. It is being used as a conjunction, with a meaning of "in spite of the fact that". If you substitute that series of words in for the while, it should be obvious that a comma is not called for:

In spite of the fact that, it looks warm outside, there is actually a cold breeze...

Answered by Hellion on December 14, 2020

Generally speaking, starting a sentence with while followed by a comma is not wrong, or grammatically not correct. In the following sentence, it is correct to use the comma after while:

While, for people in industrial countries, the experience of medicalization has often lead to a sense of disempowerment and a desire for alternatives, for many "economically disadvantaged and rural people... it is often the obstacles to access medical services that seem to constitute disempowerment" (Gruenbaum 1998:58). —Reproductive Encounters: Negev Bedouin Women's Lay Encounters at Childbirth in an Israeli Hospital; Kisch, Shifra.

The sentence you wrote as example should not have a comma after while:

While it looks warm outside, there is actually a cold breeze so it is not warm at all.

That doesn't mean while is never followed by a comma, though.

I searched in the Corpus of Contemporary American for sentences containing While with a comma (marked as [1] in the chart) and While without a comma (marked as [2]). As the CoCA doesn't allow me to search for a word starting with an uppercase letter (or at least, I could not find a way to do it), I really looked for sentences where while was preceded from a period.
What I have obtained is the following data (the scale is logaritmic):

CoCA

The British National Corpus report the following data:

BNC

In both the cases, while not followed by a comma is used in most of the cases.

Answered by kiamlaluno on December 14, 2020

Starting a sentence with while is bad style, reserved mostly for lawyers, corporate communications people, and university administrators. It is equivalent to a microaggression to the reader. AVOID.

Answered by Marco Avellaneda on December 14, 2020

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