Do You Need a Comma After ‘But’?

If you type “comma” and “but” into Google, the search engine will give you some autosuggestions including “comma after ‘but’ at beginning of sentence” and “is there a comma before or after ‘but.’”

According to editors and grammarians, there is no comma after the word ‘but’ at the beginning of a sentence. But it is something I see a lot in sentences like “But, there were too many of them to count” or “But, we were afraid the situation would get worse.”

When I see these commas in the work of writers, I invariably cross them out. If I find just one, I’ll squiggle it out and put a question mark (or sometimes a frowny face) in the margin, hoping it is a typo.  If I see another instance of ‘but’ followed by a comma, I’ll strike it out again and write “no comma after ‘but.’” If I see lots of instances of the initial ‘but’ with a comma, I’ll suggest that the writer see me. They rarely do.

It’s a small problem in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t help but wonder why writers adopt this punctuation. There is really only one comma rule that mentions conjunctions:

a comma goes before a coordinating conjunction that separates two independent clauses

So why would a writer put a comma after sentence-initial ‘but’?

I’ve got a few hypotheses.

One possibility is that it is an error of analogy. Writers see examples of the adverb “however” followed by a comma at the beginning of a sentence and make a false analogy: “however” means the same thing as ‘but’; a comma is needed after ‘however’; therefore a comma is needed after “but.” However, adverbs and conjunctions are different grammatical categories, so the analogy doesn’t yield the right punctuation.

Another possibility is that a writer is punctuating by ear, relying on the old idea that you put a comma where you take a breath. Since “but” signals a disjunction, a writer might imagine a pause and insert a comma on that basis. But punctuation is not determined solely by pauses heard in our mental ear. It is (mostly) keyed to grammatical and rhetorical categories like coordinating conjunction, independent or introductory clause, essential and inessential phrases, coordinate adjectives, and so on. If pausing is the basis for the comma...

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