"Shall," "Will," and Not Knowing It All

I like to think of myself as well-informed when it comes to usage customs and grammar rules (and "rules").  But my knowledge of usage is not exhaustive, and I learn more every day, usually by accident, necessity, or both.  I have no problem admitting this because, as the Laughing Saint, Philip Neri, taught, humility is healthy for us all.  It's a delicate balance to strike---being humble and being an expert.  Admitting that my knowledge isn't encyclopedic is one way to attempt such a balance, perhaps.

Not long ago, I overheard someone say that shall is only used with the first person.  I scratched my head, assumed this person didn't know what he was talking about, and went about my merry way.  That was foolish of me in many ways.  First, I assumed that I knew more or better without evidence.  That is, I didn't know this person's full background.  Turns out, he teaches linguistics, so there was at least some chance that he was right or that he at least had a reason to say something that, to me, sounded utterly wrong.  Second, I assumed that I had an exhaustive understanding of usage.  I do not.  No one does.  Third, in assuming as much, I was giving up any chance at learning (a) what the truth is and either (b) why the custom/rule is as he said it is or (c) why he'd say it is if it's not.  I was being lazy at best and self-righteous at worst.

So here I am, several weeks later, looking at someone else's use of shall and wondering "Was that guy right?"  The question, once ignored, now nagged at me.  I picked up my grammar books.  No information there.  That told me that this must be a usage issue, a matter of custom and/or culture.  So I picked up my soon-to-be-erstwhile CMS 16th edition and turned to the usage section.  Nothing under shall.  Then I unshelved my Oxford American usage handbook, and lo and behold, clarity.

Here's the skinny on shall v. well, according to Bryan A. Gardner: "Grammarians formerly relied on [a] paradigm, which now has little utility."  That paradigm is that when shall is used with the first person (i.e., I or we), it indicates futurity (i.e., that something will, indeed, happen in the future).

Example: I shall go to the store later today.  But he will not.

However(!!), when shall is used with the second (you) or third person (i.e., he, she, it, or they), it connotes a command or promise, an obligation.  It suddenly has what might be described in speech-act theory as illocutionary force---it does something in addition to meaning something.

Example: I will not agree to that contract, and if you wish to remain in business with me, you shall not, either.

Will indicates futurity for second and third person but not first.  When used with first person, it has the illocutionary force of indicating a promise or command.

The distinction is very fine, highly contextual, and therefore easily disregarded.  I'm not saying it's not a useful distinction; I'm saying I'm not surprised that people have stopped honoring it (did they ever?  I do wonder).

Gardner includes this pertinent quip from "Professor Gustave Arit of the University of California":

The artificial distinction between shall and will to designate futurity is a superstition that has neither a basis in historical grammar nor the sound sanction of universal usage.  It is a nineteenth-century affectation [that] certain grammarians have tried hard to establish and perpetuate. ... [T]hey have not succeeded.

Ouch.  So, does the distinction exist?  Sort of.  Am I surprised that I hadn't happened upon it?  No.  I wouldn't fault any of my linguistics or English professors for not teaching it.  Was the person whom I heard articulate the rule as easily dismissed as I thought?  Well, no.  He may only have had one side of a story that is increasingly not being told, but "wrong" is too strong.  In the end, having the distinction in mind is useful, even if I continue to use shall to connote promises or commands and will to indicate futurity in a sort of blanket way.  I won't go around correcting anyone who hangs on to this person-based paradigm.

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Grammarly Is Not Your Friend

I'm sure that the people who work at Grammarly are good citizens, great at cocktail parties, and willing to save kittens from trees, burning buildings, etc.  I want to start proleptically by saying my beef with Grammarly is not with its employees, nor is it necessarily with the founders, owners, and/or investors of the company.  My goal with this long-overdue post in the Oratoria is to warn you--the language-interested reader who desires to have excellent if not flawless writing for whatever your writing needs may be--that what you want from Grammarly is not necessarily what you're going to get.  Because it can't be.  So what's a writer to do?  I've got a few suggestions for you, some of which you'll like more than others.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a company that is heavily invested--to the tune of approximately $110 million, primarily from five venture-capital firms--in "using artificial intelligence to help people with the substance and content of what they write," according to CEO Brad Hoover.

My gloss on this is that Grammarly is a glorified version of the frankly adorable paperclip in ancient iterations of Microsoft Word, except that the paperclip gave users pointers about how to use Word in addition to pointing out typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.  Grammarly sticks to the errors (Wikipedia says that Grammarly checks 250 million rules, but I can't verify that anywhere else, so consider it hearsay at this point).  I would also be remiss not to note that this claim is problematic insofar as changes to grammar do not necessarily equate to "substan[tive]" changes to meaning, let alone writing.  Chomsky proved that decades ago.

What is it, as a service?  Imagine paying a monthly fee to have Word check your spelling and grammar.  Imagine paying a monthly fee so that you can have a plugin for your browser that does what Word does in checking your spelling and grammar as you, say, type an email (or a blog post).  That's what people pay for when they pay for Grammarly.  The algorithms that the company uses to help narrow down the probability that certain conditions have or have not been met in any combination of words (i.e., that sentences are grammatical or not) are maybe better than Word's, more refined, more nuanced, more-regularly updated (but does it constitute the development of artificial intelligence?  Well, the mere use of algorithms does not artificial intelligence make), but even proving the validity of that assertion would depend on which test is being administered.

What's So Problematic about Grammarly?

Nothing, except that it's only marginally helpful.

"But wait!" you say.  "I use Grammarly, and just like in the commercials, it saved me from using a typo or misplacing a modifier in that email to my boss.  Yikes!"  Sure, but Word might have been able to help you catch that, too.  For free.

What's really problematic was a problem that started well before the point at which you, the Grammarly user, thought to yourself, "I better make sure my boss doesn't catch any errors in what I write for work."  Here's a brief summary of the layers upon layers of problems that led you to Grammarly:

1. You weren't taught properly to rely upon--not just how to use but that you need to use--a proper handbook.  Anything that you feel unsure about, you could look up in a writer's handbook like The Everyday Writer or A College Grammar of English, depending on your needs.  A cheap handbook that I love to recommend is The Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford.  Everything that Grammarly "knows" is in that handbook, and you can get it for less than the price of one month's subscription to Grammarly.
2. You weren't taught the basics of grammar.  When you open up a handbook to learn about why "which" needs a comma but "that" doesn't, you may be thrown off by terms like "restrictive."  And what's a "modifier," anyway?  "Gerund"?  Who is "Gerund"? Your parents (and you) should have gone to your school board and demanded to be challenged in your English classes.  Shakespeare is important, too, but understanding grammar is far, far more important insofar as you need to understand the fundamentals of the linguistic tools you use to navigate your world each day of your life.  Which leads to the next point...
3. The education and teacher-training system set you up to be ignorant.  This is partly because of standardized testing and the need to teach lots and lots of things to students.  Learning grammar takes time, especially if it's not intuitive (chemistry isn't intuitive for me, so I empathize).  Frankly, I'd bet that if you had a map of the U.S. and put a dot for each city/town in which at least one school has an expert in English language or even someone with more than six hours of English-grammar college-level education, the map would have fewer than 50 tiny specks.  Instead, we have teachers who aren't equipped to teach anything about grammar and usage, so why do we assume our students will know it?  Don't blame the teachers, though...
4. I put a lot of blame on my own field, rhetoric and composition, for downplaying the importance of teaching the formal aspects of language for the sake of promoting the cultural aspects of communication.  Yes, it's true that there are multiple dialects of English and that communities should have the right to the use of their own dialect, that no dialect is inherently better than another.  However, if our students can't describe the ways in which a dialect operates and differs from another dialect--if they can't identify articles, verbs, syntactic complexity, etc., and analyze why, rhetorically, speakers and writers might use those elements for a purpose in any given context--then our attention to the cultural aspects of communication are pointless, because we're just telling people that something is a certain way without empowering them to understand how it is.  The "social turn" in my field should have been a time when we doubled down on teaching grammar, linguistics, and usage and then coupling them with cultural rhetorics and linguistics; instead, we chucked the one that looked like science and embraced the one that we thought was important by itself, for itself.  I argue that our students would be more empowered if they could explain how and why they are communicating or how and why others' communication affects their identities and rights; right now, few can.
5. Because of the highly conditional nature of language--a function of the highly conditional nature of human social and cognitive contexts--what counts as an error to one person may not to another at any given point in time.  It wasn't until grad school that I learned how to use an em dash properly.  Now I find out that I'm applying the rule I learned far too stringently--that it's okay to use as an extendo tool like this.  It drives me nuts when people do it, even though it's something I used to do all the time.  I have a different set of rules in my head.  What rules does Grammarly have?  How adaptable is its "reasoning"?  Can you talk back and forth with the algorithm about what the rhetorical repercussions are of having used an em dash in the way that you did, in any given context?  Can Grammarly's alleged AI help you weigh the cost-benefit for a nuanced audience?  How do you know that something is an error?  How does Grammarly know?  Who gets to decide what's right and wrong in language use?

Grammarly fixes exactly none of these problems.  It doesn't educate the user.  It doesn't advocate for better teacher education to empower writers to be able to control their own language.  It takes money from people and puts a bandaid over all of this.  What's more, when people use Grammarly, they can't tell whether the fixes proposed by the Grammarly system are actually fixes.  In this way, Grammarly is kind of like going to a psychic.  Your psychic might be 100% right that you shouldn't marry your fiance, but you don't know that, and there's no way for you to verify it until it's too late.  Similarly, unless you can open up a handbook and point to the place where the handbook explains that no, you don't need a comma before a coordinating conjunction that splices two independent clauses in most cases (or what "coordinating conjunction" and "independent clause" even mean), among any number of additional rules about commas, then you don't know whether Grammarly has given you an accurate fix when it suggested deleting that one comma.  You are at Grammarly's mercy, in that case.

Don't Even Get Me Started with the Plagiarism-Detection Service

Companies like Turnitin and, now, Grammarly are compiling gigantic databases of writing.  This should give each of you pause.  What are they doing with your writing?  Is your privacy protected?  Which copyrights have you given away by virtue of having used these services?  Read all about it here.

What's the Solution?

I suppose we have to find a time machine and go back to the '80s and tell rhet-compsters not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  There isn't enough R&D funding for that at the moment, I hear, so instead you have a range of options that are better than Grammarly:

• Less-costly options:
  • Merely using Word (or whatever word processor you prefer)
  • Using a handbook.  This will take more time than using Word, because you'll have to spend time with it, learning about grammar, before you can really get optimal use out of it.
• More-costly options:
  • Take a class on writing, but look at the syllabus first to make sure that there's plenty of attention paid to grammar and usage
  • Better yet, take an introductory linguistics class.  Then buy a handbook; you'll suddenly find it much more approachable. 
  • Ideally, you'd be able to secure the services of a professional editor.  I negotiate payment plans for students (and, really, anyone else who knows they're going to have difficulty paying a single lump sum for professional help), and many other copyeditors will, too.  Yes, it will be more than $15/month, but the monthly subscription price that you're paying to Grammarly is really just for wishful thinking.  If you're only using Grammarly, then you'll still need to have your writing checked over by a professional to ensure that it's actually correct because, hey, you don't know enough to know whether the automated advice given to you by Grammarly is worth anything or not.  Kinda undercuts the value of the subscription, doesn't it?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who thought that Grammarly was the panacea for your writing woes.  What I'm trying to tell you is that it's actually much more important that you understand how writing works so that you'll be able to evaluate whether you're getting good advice, whether it's from an algorithm or from a copyeditor such as me.  Both the algorithm and I can make suggestions for improving your grammaticality, but I can make suggestions and changes that affect your writing qua writing, not qua grammatical strings of words that may or may not be meaningful or effective.  And I can teach you about how I've done it, if you want to know.

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How to Correct Someone's Usage, or: (Not) Making Usage Great Again

I used to date a philosopher.  He was (is still, I'm sure) brilliant.  I remember having a long, adversarial conversation with him about the use of "beg the question."  In case you don't know--and many people don't--"beg the question" is a technical term.  It's used to refer to a flaw in logic/argumentation in which the assertion you're making essentially assumes that the basis of the assertion is true.  If I say that G-d exists because G-d said "I AM," then I'm begging the question: it's already assumed in my assertion--that G-d said "I AM"--that G-d exists.  (This possible logical fallacy is not a problem for me as a Christian, because I haven't confused logic with faith, and I don't require that my faith be logically sound.  But that's a conversation for another day.)  The philosopher was making what philosophers would call a "strong" claim that anyone who misuses "beg the question" should be corrected lest the phrase lose its meaning because of (but not due to) misuse.  That is, if everyone uses it to mean "presents the question" or "requires you to wonder," then no one will know its (true) technical meaning!!  And how will we sleep at night??

The point I made in response to him was descriptive (though he took it as prescriptive): the phrase is already being misused, so don't get too hung up on correcting everyone, because that's a Sisyphean task. 

The philosopher was not amused.

What is Usage?

Usage has to do with how we use language--from punctuation to turns of phrase--to communicate.  It's governed by convention, not divine law and not dictionaries.  It changes over time.  What you learned about the "right" (read: customary) way to say or write this or that can differ greatly from the way that someone else who lives a few blocks, states, or continents away from you.  I'll never forget telling a flatmate of mine in London to stop talking about her "pants" because the Londoners in the room were getting uncomfortable thinking that she was talking about her underwear (to them, she meant "trousers"). 

Do you have a pet peeve about a phrase that gets commonly misused (or so you think)?  They're everywhere.  Some of my favorite examples:

• "for all intensive purposes" should be "for all intents and purposes"
• "flushed out" should be "fleshed out" ("I fleshed out the details")
• "moment being" should, to my ears, be "time being" ("I'm home, at least for the time being")

Some pet peeves might turn out just to be regional variations that you didn't know about.  My hillbilly kinfolk say "you'ns" to indicate the plural second-person.  Think that's annoying?  Sorry, but it's not wrong, at least not according to certain dialects of regional English.  It's just not customary to use outside of that regional variation.  For all I know, "moment being" might be the same way.

Here's what you can't attribute what you think is a misuse of English to:

• stupidity
• neglect
• moral failure
• an untrained mind
• poor parenting
• economic background
• poor education.

The philosopher was convinced that he had it "right," and he did, in a technical sense.  But people who say "beg the question" in a non-technical sense probably don't have his extensive and excellent training in philosophy.  It's not because they're dumb or lazy or had parents who didn't discipline and/or love them sufficiently.  It's because they just don't know.  People rarely like getting usage wrong; we hang so much judgment on using "correct grammar" (which people usually use incorrectly to refer to both "correct" and "grammar," so add that phrase to my pet peeve list), so it's unlikely that the misuser is doing so on purpose.  Hard to judge someone for not doing something right that they didn't know was wrong.

Correcting Misusers

Oh, wait.  The subheading here and the title of this post kinda beg the question, don't they?  We're assuming that we should correct people who misuse language conventions!  I don't accept that assumption, actually, so let's approach this issue somewhat algorithmically.

How to determine whether you should correct someone's usage:

• The most important question must be: do you know FOR A FACT that the phrase (or whatever) in question has been used in a way that does not adhere to current convention?  Could you point to a passage in a handbook, for example, that unequivocally proves that whatever you're about to lay down a correction for is, in fact, in need of correction?  If not, abandon your intention.  In this case, you do not possess the requisite knowledge, expertise, or validation to issue a correction. 
  • What can you do instead?  At best, you could ask a question: "Oh, that's interesting.  You said 'beg the question.'  I thought it was only used to refer to logical fallacies.  Have I gotten that wrong?"  Always, always assume the position of humility.  Do not ask, "Where did you learn to say it that way?" or "Were you aware that it's actually...?"  Your objective is to make, not alienate, friends, right?
• Is the person you want to correct a loved one to whom you are not a parent?  If yes, then...
  • What can you do?  Don't correct them.  Why would you want to?  Just let them be.  That said, parents get the right to correct their children's everything: behavior, attitudes, use of salad forks, and language.  Parents, you still need to answer question 1 in the affirmative before you correct your kid's language use without an appeal to a handbook or authoritative resource.  But if you think that your kid has misused a phrase or word, you can say, "I don't think that 'beg the question' means what you think it means.  Go get your English handbook [or tablet or dictionary, etc.] and look it up and come tell me what it says."  That way, you'll both learn things!  And you'll be modelling for kiddo that it's okay not to know things and to risk being wrong.  Takes a lot of strength, that.
• Is the person you want to correct someone over whom you have some kind of managerial authority?  That is, you're his boss or you're her mentor or you're their teacher.  In that case...
  • What can you do?  Never, ever, ever correct that person in front of other people.  Again, the less-enlightened among us still judge others for their "correct" usage of conventions.  Be aware of that before you go shaming someone for misusing "flushed out."  That said, in large office settings, if you're the boss, you might be able to get away with a general email that says something like "I want to make sure we're using 'flush out' correctly.  Unless we're talking about plumbing, we ought to avoid it.  Let's make sure we're using 'flesh out' from here on to refer to adding details or looking at additional information.  That'll help us stay consistent across the whole office."  But in individual contexts, I would recommend adding a comment about a misuse as an afterthought to something else: "It really was a great first draft.  I'm glad we've spent the last 30 minutes discussing it.  By the way, before we talk about when we're having our next conversation, I noticed that you use 'flushed out' when I would have used 'fleshed out.'  I looked it up in my usage dictionary, and where you have 'flushed out,' it should be 'fleshed out.'  I wanted to make sure I mention it to you so that you adjust this draft.  It's important to impress your readers, so I wanted to make sure that you've got the tightest prose possible."  Wordy?  Yes.  Tactful?  Mostly.  Better than red ink with no explanation for the correction or why it was important to make?  Totally.
• Is the person a stranger to you?  Then stop.  You'll exhaust yourself trying to be everyone's real-time, flesh-and-blood copyeditor.  It's not your job to make usage great again.  Change comes to all things, and if "flesh out" becomes "flush out," what's the difference?  If "begging the question" has both a technical and a colloquial sense, the Earth will continue to spin around the sun without your correcting this hapless (mis)user.

There are surely other scenarios I'm not thinking of, but the upshot is this: how should you correct someone's usage?  Generally, you shouldn't.  You should only intervene--and then, tactfully and empathetically--when the quality of your/your employee's/your student's/your child's work and/or reputation are at stake.  And that's if and only if you know for sure that the correction you're making is actually a correction and not, say, just your imposition of your own personal standards.

Life's short.  There are some battles worth fighting.  "Begging the question," in most (but not all) circumstances, isn't one of them.

Much Ado about Singular "They"

I promised myself that I'd only spend an hour on this post, because rapid rivers of ink have gushed forth from those smarter and more qualified than I to opine on the matter of the use of singular "they."  But a friend and colleague asked the other day whether it's right or wrong to use the singular "they," so let's have that conversation.

Neither right nor wrong

As with most usage issues in English, it's not as if there's a definitively right or wrong way to use singular "they."  I say that with my descriptivist hat on: I'm trying just to describe how English gets used, not lay down proscriptions about whether it should be used in this way or that.  The "should" approach is called the prescriptivist approach.  We'll get to that.  But the upshot is that you'll never hear me or anyone from the Laughing Saint Editorial's crew say that singular "they" is right or wrong per se.  We're going to talk about whether it's appropriate once we get into the prescriptive side of things later on.

So, what are you going to learn in this post?  A little bit about what other experts say, a little about gender theory, and a little about yourself.

Please ignore Grammar Girl

I've got a post I'm saving up about why Grammar Girl isn't your friend (do you use WebMD instead of a doctor?  No.  So you shouldn't use Grammar Girl and assume you've gotten accurate grammar/usage advice.  I digress).  That said, we do need to start this conversation by looking at what experts (i.e., not Grammar Girl) have said about the use of singular "they," both descriptively and prescriptively.

I'm a rhetorician with a background in linguistics (my dissertation director was a nationally-recognized linguist who helped create the Dictionary of American Regional English, and I have something like a master's worth of coursework in English grammar, including English-language history and functional, cognitive, and generative grammars), which means I think of language/linguistics as the foundation of rhetoric.  Rhetoric is, more or less, how we use communication--verbal and otherwise--to do things.  Note the importance there of the word "use."  "English language usage" refers to customs of language usage, not the rules (flexible and dynamic though they may be) of grammar, which is really about how words get put together to make sense (but whether they achieve some purpose, well, that's a question for rhetoric and usage and style rather than grammar).  Grammar is how the Lego blocks fit together; rhetoric is whether you've used your blocks to make a castle or a bridge and why you'd want to build one or the other.

So, before we can understand whether and how to use (!) singular "they," we have to understand its basis in language and the history of the language.  The fact is that singular "they" has been used in the English language since before "correct spelling" was a thing.  There's something like four centuries of time lag between the two, actually: singular "they" is at least as old as the 14th century, and spelling and other matters of language use were being codified in the 18th and 19th centuries.  That's just the descriptive facts.  So the historical argument suggests that there's precedent both for using singular "they" and for not using it, as language standards started to be implemented.

Since history won't save you, how about the brain?  Here's a great analysis from the Bible of approachable linguistics scholarly news, Language Log, about how using the singular "they" has been shown to require increased processing time (meaning: it does seem to take a handful of milliseconds longer to understand what "they" or "their" refers to when it refers to a singular noun).  But we're talking about milliseconds, not a complete breakdown in semantics (how sentences make meaning).  So cognitive arguments aren't going to save you, either, because it would be patently risible to claim that understanding singular "they" creates such a significant cognitive burden that singular "they" should never be used.

What about semantics, though?  Can you argue that the use of singular "they" creates vagueness in sentences that can't be overcome?  Actually, I think this is the best argument against using it.  Note that the sentence "The student took their book to class" makes perfect sense to some folks.  To me, it causes at least momentary confusion: Wait, did this person intend to use "their"?  Are we suddenly talking about some other group of people?  Did I miss the change in subject or meaning?  Grammatically, we can change the rules (or change them back) such that "they" is officially alright to use in singular contexts, but just like I have to read some sentences a couple of times before I understand whether "read" is past or present tense, I might have to read a sentence that uses singular "they" a couple of times before I'm assured of whom we're talking about, and there might still be some ambiguity.  Furthermore, at the moment, we don't allow for "themself," which would be the singular reflexive form of the plural pronoun, which suggests to me that we're still not there, descriptively, when it comes to the singular use of the plural pronoun.  I could be asking for too much (we use "themselves" as the singular reflexive instead), but I think that when we get to "themself," we'll be fully in singular "they" semantics.  Right now, we're not.

On the ground

That said, when it comes to language use on the ground, some folks use singular "they" to promote a gender-neutral perspective.  In many ways, I support this, but that's not my only reason for using singular "they," though I don't use it all that often (see the semantic argument against it, above).  That said, I do use singular "they" not only in speech but occasionally in my Oratoria posts and elsewhere.  There are good reasons to use singular "they," just a few of which include:

1. Respecting other people's wishes when it comes to the pronouns they prefer.  Don't be a self-righteous jerk: if someone asks that you use "she" or "they" or "he," just do your best to do that.  There's no reason to make a big deal about it.  If that person changes their (!) mind about it later (an argument I've heard against having to keep up with personal pronoun choices), what's it to you?  You can be forgiven slip-ups, in that case, but remember that most of the time, making that kind of change isn't something an individual takes lightly, so don't plan on being asked to adjust more than once per person.
2. Accepting linguistic (and social) change.  It's not so much that words change, but our use of and rules for them change.  Happens all the time.  Don't imagine that you've got the form of English that G-d loves best.  Unless you've got some stone tablets lying about that you wanna tell us about, and those tablets are about grammar and usage, there's no reason to be upset about language change.  Unless you're trying to use language as a tool of oppression or control, that is.
3. It fits the context you're writing or speaking for.  If I'm editing a blog post written for a website geared to people in their teens, I'm giving a pass to singular "they."  If I'm editing a book written by one of my clients in the business world, there shall be no singular "they" if I have anything to say about it.  The Chicago Manual of Style is unequivocal about their rejection of singular "they" (I have to believe it's because it occasionally creates ambiguities that can't be resolved semantically/grammatically), for example.  So is The New Yorker.  As a rule, for me, I decide to allow singular "they" if and only if:
   1. It doesn't create ambiguities that can't be resolved easily by the reader
   2. The applicable style guide allows for it
   3. The audience is likely not to have a fit about it
   4. The writer wrote it (i.e., I won't go adding it where it isn't already).

So, it's not as if this is a right-or-wrong issue.  It's really a matter of rhetoric: how do you plan to use singular "they," and why?  Will it work in your specific context?  Those are the salient questions.

"The house caught on fire; also...": Why you should avoid using "also" as a transition

If there's one transition word that I wish I could wage holy (and, admittedly, self-righteous) jihad against, it's also.  As a transition, also is not your friend.  It is not here to save you.  And using it will only mark you as the noob to writing that you may or may not be.

Before I get too wound up, let me clarify: Today's lesson is especially geared to less-experienced writers, especially high-school and college-level writers, in addition to new teachers of English who're struggling to articulate why they feel queasy when they see a sentence that begins with "Also."  Even if you don't fall into one of these categories, keep reading, because I explain a principle about transitions that's helpful for everyone.

What's the problem with also?

There's nothing inherently wrong with the word also.  I'm not here to argue that it should never be used, that it's best to avoid it, or any of the other typical, universalizing, overly-generalized dicta that other writing gurus are in the habit of nailing to doorposts.  Despite my opening "jihad" metaphor, what I really want is not for us to abolish the word also but to understand that it is a top contender for Weakest and Therefore Most Useless Transition Word and should probably be avoided on those grounds.

What's the difference between transition also and other uses of also?

First, let's clarify that also, as a part of speech, is an adverb, so it's got lots of uses, functionally (rather than grammatically) speaking. 

Here's an example of also put to good use:

There are three good paths for walking to the store, but there are also two good paths for biking there.

In this case, "also" modifies the coordinating conjunction, indicating not a contradiction but an addition that is different.  "And" could replace "but," but the use of "but" carries with it a functional emphasis on contradiction, and "also" manages to squeeze in some of the additive sense that "and" would have added.

Now, here's an example what I'm calling transition also:

There are many reasons to adopt this policy.  Also, several experts have called for similar policy measures to be taken.

What the writer is trying to do here is tie the first sentence to the next one.  Sometimes, I see "also" used like this but with a semicolon instead of a period used between the two sentences/independent clauses.  Doesn't matter; the problem is still the same: the transition here is weak and vague.

I used to tell my students that also could be used to tie together any two sentences and make it seem as if there's a transition there without there actually being any there there (so to speak).  My favorite example of this was:

I went to the store today.  Also, the house caught on fire.

Huh?  What's the relationship of these two ideas?

See, that's the principle of transitions: they should always clarify what you think the relationship of Idea A is to Idea B.  If your transition misses the mark either by being vague or inaccurate, you're not doing your readers any favors.  You're suggesting that the path from Idea A is up some stairs and around the corner when in fact the way to Idea B requires crossing a highway and walking six blocks.  There's a slight difference between "and" and "but also" and a much bigger difference between "therefore" and "however."  It's up to you to help your readers know where they're going in your writing.

Still not sure how also is vague?  Try substituting another more-specific transition word in its place.  The results reveal just how comically vague also is:

I went to the store today.  Therefore, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  However, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Alternatively, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Consequently, the house caught on fire.

How can you remediate transition also?

I see transition also all the time in my EFL students' and clients' writing.  Whenever I see it, I ask the writer, "What's the relationship between Idea A and Idea B?  Why did you put this sentence [or phrase] after the first one?"  In the case of my favorite example, it's hard to explain how going to the store is related to the house catching on fire.  If there's no way to explain it, I'd tell the writer to reconsider organization: Maybe one of the sentences needs to find a more appropriate place in the paper.  If the writer can articulate the reason, then I suggest that we make that reason clearer.  Chronology seems to be the most likely reason for putting Idea A (about going to the store) next to Idea B (the house catching on fire), in my example, so I might suggest using "Subsequently" as an alternative to "Also."

So, the next time you find yourself writing "also," especially at the beginning of a sentence, stop to wonder whether you're using it as the glue that ties ideas together (not just in a list or in phrases like "and also" or "but also").  If you are, ask yourself whether there's a more-specific term you could use to express that relationship.  Your readers will thank you.