I see how it is. A bunch of diagram lovers. Well we got a name for folks like you where I’m from . . . .
Professor!
DaLovin’ Dj
I didn’t take much english in high school–I got placed out of it in 7th grade and didn’t take another class until my senior year. It was quite a shock when the teacher asked me to do it. Once I figured out what she was asking, I couldn’t stop laughing. It always struck me as busywork of the worst kind.
“Why, their pens are moving, it must be educational.” snort
Hey Professor, what’s another word for pirate treasure?
Why, I believe it’s “booty.”
That’s what it is.
Way to work the beasties in!
Dalovin’Dj
Whoo-hoo, some more sentence diagramming fans! The perfect place to issue my long-standing ultimate challenge: Can you diagram the first sentence in the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”? I do not believe it is possible. I do not think that sentence is syntactically correct.
For reference, here it is:
Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed through the twilight’s last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
It appears to me that the people who are pro-diagramming seem to have pretty fair sentence structure and grammar. Coincidence? Perhaps.
…but then again, the same people who diagram sentences for fun are also the very same people who read dictionaries in their spare time…coincidence? 
Hey, don’t be dissin’ dictionary reading. Not much plot or character development, but they’re really quite captivating once you get into them, ya know.
Well jeez, don’t I feel cheated. I haven’t got the faintest clue what diagramming sentences is all about. Looking back, it seems we spent most of grade school learning about the voyage of the Mimi, the tiniest ship in the world. Now that I’m a famous whaling ship captain, I guess that knowledge has served me well, but if I had chosen a less booty-riffic occupation, like traffic cop or Ernest Borgnine, perhaps I would have been better off learning to diagram sentences.
Huh.
Nyah, nyah. Feather reads dictionaries for fun. throws fruit
i am good at diagramming sentences. but i hate it nonetheless. it is so dumb, and boring, and pointless and annoying!!!
bad experiences while digramming sentences…
It definitely has too many commas and some obscure grammatical constructs. Additionally, some words are implicit rather than explicit (I forget what the name for this is). Anyhow, it can be done, but I’m not about to try do it in ASCII.
Tease. 
I still don’t think it’s diagrammable: I think that the “broad stripes and bright stars” are simultaneously the object of “we watched” and the subject of “were streaming.” I don’t think that’s an “obscure grammatical construct,” I think that’s incorrect. Contradictions (with explanations) welcome.
I don’t think it’s the object of ‘we watched’; I think the ramparts are the object of ‘we watched’. The song was about trying to see if the fort had been claimed by the Americans, if I remember rightly. So watching the ramparts, looking for the flag…makes sense, no? Assuming those commas are placed accurately, I’m surprised you didn’t see this yourself as a possibility, Kimtsu.
Anyhow, the sentence makes perfect sense to me, even if it is convoluted and a run-on. It could be taken apart easily, but like ultrafilter said, it’d be a pain to do on the computer. Easy, but long.
Don’t ask me to diagram it either. I never had to do diagramming work in English, so I’m unfamiliar with the procedure. 
Honors classes were the way to go in high school.
The “whose” in front of broad stripes and bright stars indicates that it’s a relative clause. They are the subject of “were streaming” but not the the object of “we watched”. BayleDomon’s interpretation of “We watched” is probably correct.
Thank you.
And just to clarify it a little further, since on reflection ‘o’er the ramparts we watched’ still sounds a little strange… What might have happened is Francis Scott Key left out the word ‘that’, as in ‘o’er the ramparts [that] we watched’. It is, after all, a song, and rules that apply to prose don’t necessarily have to apply to poetry when the ungrammatical version sounds better.
Them darned poets with their license to mangle the English language. Hrmpf.
switches off nit-picking mode
You see this in many schools, and it really drives me crazy. Quick students need grammar more than average kids: what happens is that quick kids (read: future dopers) get real good at faking grammar, so no one ever bothers to teach us. We never have the oppurtunity to learn the whys and the reasons for “sounds right”, and that limits our potential as writers. I moved many times in high school and had 8 different English teachers. Only one of them felt grammar was worth talking about, and we diagrammed sentences til our fingers bled. That was the class where I really learned to be a deliberate writer, not a hit-or-miss writer–I learned that instead of hoping the muse would drop by, you could get out the bullwhip and make that bitch work for you. Most important thing I ever learned.
On a purely personal level, I admit I love diagraming sentences. And filling in Venn diagrams. And simplyfing really, really complex fractions. But my all time favorite is solving the sort of truth table that you have to write out on hte long side of a piece of graph paper.
Can you please define how my potential as a writer has been limited? I do get paid for it after all, and I’m still waiting for someone to come along and tell me what the hell diagramming a sentence is.
[sub]I have an inkling that it means identifying the various parts of a sentence. Like nouns, pronouns, verbs, and um… um… other stuff. [/sub]
A sentance diagram is a visual representation of how the parts of a sentence relate to each other–not just the part of speech, but the connections between the different words.
I didn’t mean to imply that anyone who never diagraqmmed sentences is limited as a writer. There are other ways to learn to think critically and objectivly about language. However, I do hold that anyone who has never been taught a way to speak and think about the structure of a piece of writing (independent of the content) is at a serious disadvantage. It is possible to reinvent the wheel, of course, but the school system isn’t doing anyone any favors if they expect everyone to do just that.
BD: *I think the ramparts are the object of ‘we watched’. *
Hmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Well, okay. Guess that takes care of that.