Grammar – Can ‘Similar to’ be Used at the Beginning of a Sentence?

Whenever I read “Can I…” on this list it reminds me of the teenage girls of my youth writing to agony aunts asking whether they could let their boyfriends…

If you thought it was all right, you wouldn’t have to ask, would you?

This particular construction has only become popular relatively recently, and, for instance, you will not find it in the Merriam-Webster examples for ‘similar’. However, like morals, usage changes, so my answer is:

You can, if you really want to, but there are far more elegant alternatives. And I certainly would not — under any circumstances.

This particular expression makes me cringe, because — grammatical or ungrammatical — it is alien to the English language as I have used it for very many years. It really comes down to a question of style, which is perhaps off-topic, but let me suggest how you might express this idea. Certainly you do not need to say “It is similar to…” — just drop ‘similar’. You can replace a three-syllable Latinate word by ‘as’ a familiar one-syllable English one:

As in(with/for) the proof showing x=1, we have y=1…

I have supplied alternative prepositions that might be appropriate for contexts other than a mathematical proof. In general English ‘with’ comes first to mind.

Of course there are other word orders possible, depending on where you wish the emphasis to fall (x, y or the comparison), but that wasn’t the question.

Grammar

I’m not a grammarian — so my terminology may not be correct — but it seems to me that the underlying grammatical reason that the sentence starting with “Similar to…” makes me cringe is that ‘similar’ is an adjective and there is no obvious noun to which it is being applied. (Further, the noun ‘proof’ in the first phrase is being equated with ‘x=1’ — it is difficult to be sure because the context is incomplete.)

This is probably why an adverbial phrase “As for…” seems better to me, because it can qualify the verb ‘have’. A test is rewriting it. The “as for…” reads naturally after “We have y=1,” but inversion of order cannot afford a similar rescue.

If you really have to use the word ‘similar’

If you think ‘as’ implies identity, and you feel must assert similarity, then use similar as a simple adjective in an adverbial phrase, and adopt a general solutions to clumsy academic writing — split your sentence in two. In this case you could write something like:

The proof for y=1 is performed in a similar manner. [Amplify in next senentence]

or

The proof for y=1 is performed in a similar manner to that for x=1.

The short sentence in the former case is more emphatic.