Tom.Thomson (5/18/2010)

---

Nice guidelines up to a point. There something rather bizarre though: the claim that "following" is not a noun and therefor can't begin a sentence is pure nonsense. It's actually the kind of error that irritates me intensely. Words like "following" have two functions in English: to act as present participles, ie as a particular kind of adjective, and to act as gerunds, ie as a particular kind of noun.

Following the rules of English grammar leads inevitably to the conclusion that that all gerunds are nouns, including "following". If you want to avoid people writing things where "following" is used as a noun but not as a gerund (for example "The following is another way of achieving the same result.") just say that, and don't pretend that the use of "following" as a noun is not perfectly good English, since using it as a gerund (a verbal noun) is perfectly correct English as the first sentence in this paragraph demonstrates. If instead you want to ban all sentences which use "following" as a noun I guess that's up to you, they are your rules/guidelines, but don't appeal to the imaginary nonexistence of the noun "following" to justify it - because they are your rules you don't have to justify it at all, so why give a nonsense justification? If you feel you must justify this rule, you could say (as you have elesewhere) "don't do it because most of you get it wrong".

I suspect that your apparent view that use of "following" as a noun in the italicised sentence above is not generally accepted as good English usage is a bit out of date, but I wouldn't complain about that because my some of my own views on English usage are probably a bit out of date too. And of course these things are sometimes different on different sides of the pond.