Flagging Sentences Starting with Undesirable Words

Jasmin needs a way to somehow flag sentences that begin with a set of undesirable words, such as conjunctions.

The easiest way to accomplish this task is to use a macro. Conceptually, the macro needs to step through each sentence in a document, look at the first word in the sentence, and flag the word if it is undesired. The following macro will do just that:

Sub HighlightBadFirstWords()
    Const BadWordList = " And Or But Hopefully "
    Dim s As Range

    For Each s In ActiveDocument.Content.Sentences
        If InStr(1, BadWordList, " " & _
          Trim(s.Words.First.Text & " "), vbTextCompare) Then
            s.Words.First.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
        End If
    Next s
End Sub

The key to this macro is putting together the undesirable words in the BadWordList constant. Notice that each word is separated by a space and there is a space at the beginning and end of the words. This spacing is important. It is also important to make sure that none of the words includes any punctuation marks.

The reason for this is rather simple. The macro uses the Words collection for each sentence in the document. This collection treats punctuation as a word. Thus, if a sentence began with "But," (with the comma), then that is two words—"But" and ",".

You should also understand that the macro is case insensitive. So, if a sentence begins with "AND," that will be marked, even though the BadWordList constant contains "And". If you want to make the macro pay attention to case, then change vbTextCompare to vbBinaryCompare.

All of that said, Jasmin may want to remember that there is no grammatical rule that indicates it is improper for a sentence to start with a conjunction. Check your favorite style guide, and you will find that this is the case. (Mine tends to be the Chicago Manual of Style. In the 17th edition, see 5.203; in the 18th edition see 5.209.) Even with no disallowing rule in place, however, you may find it helpful to mark such words to make sure that their sentence-beginning use is warranted.

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