conjunctionssentence-starts
I know it’s OK to start sentences with While, but is it OK to start a text with it? For example:
While electron-electron correlations and interactions are crucial in the descriptions of atoms and molecules, studies of ionization in the strong-field régime have in general ignored their effects.
I’ve had a look in the corpora but I can’t quite see how to ask the question there.
It is appropriate when you have simply flipped the clauses:
I stayed inside because it was raining.
Because it was raining, I stayed inside.
What the teacher was trying to teach was that a a subordinate clause is not a complete sentence:
I stayed inside.
This is a complete sentence.
Because it was raining.
This is not; the conjunction because makes it subordinate and therefore, it requires an associated independent clause.
Here's a question that the Google NGram Viewer can actually help with. Look at the values on the Y axis. The usage of "Due to" at the beginning of a sentence has reached 0.0008% in 2008. That may not sound like much, but it represents orders of magnitude more frequency than most of the NGrams offered as proof on this SE site.
Only the severest and most arbitrary prescriptivist would argue that all these instances are wrong.
Best Answer
While beginning a text with the word while is perfectly acceptable, your primary concern, it seems to me, should be its effect on your audience, and whether or not the sentence is sufficiently strong to draw them into what you have to say.
"While electron-electron correlations and interactions . . ." has an informal and slightly chatty feel to it. The sentence sounds as if it would be more appropriate in the middle of a paragraph, and not at the beginning. Here's a hypothetical and illustrative paragraph, which for simplicity's sake contains blanks:
In a perhaps overly simplified explanation of the above, you have the following: a solid and foundational statement, followed by a few prominent examples to buttress your first statement. Then there comes a transitional statement that accomplishes two things. First, it praises the findings of past researchers (assuming their contributions to the field are considered unassailable by your peers), and second, it points to what needs to be done if your community of scientists is to push the envelope of discovery to the next level. That's where your studies in the field, which you plan to explain and develop in your text, become relevant to your readers. Make sense?