Dammit!!! This was supposed to be a flame thread about how bad diagrams suck!!! Now ya’ll debatin’ whether ramparts are the object of bla bla bla bla bla. I hope your having fun. Maybe later we can all get together and watch grass grow. It’d be about as exciting as diagraming sentences.
Fine. I’ll bite. Diagram this:
There is nothing in the world of the english laguage that sucks quite as badly as the boring, monotonous, busywork, bullshit referred to as diagraming sentences.
Dalovin’Dj
Mmmm, fruit. Something to eat while I peruse Webster’s…
[Steven Wright]
I just finished reading the dictionary. Turns out the zebra did it.
[/Steven Wright]
Sorry to bring back such an old thread, but I was reading this and realized just how much I was never taught in school.
Does anyone know of any good books to teach this stuff?
And what is this about Venn diagrams? This does not sound like the diagrams that I am familiar with.
http://www.venndiagram.com They are diagrams which show inclusion/exclusion, often used in set theory. Usually in the forms of shapes (often circles) which overlap to some extent, thus allowing separate groups to share some components. Not familiar with them being used for sentences, etc.
I hate, hate, hated sentence diagramming. And no, it did not do a damn thing to improve my grammar. I learned more about English grammar in Latin class than I ever did in English class, and that’s the sad truth.
Are these Reed-Kellog diagrams a specifically American thing? I don’t recall them from when I was a wee kiddie… though I do recall being taught how to parse sentences, and what subjects, verbs, and direct and indirect objects were, all that kind of thing.
Let’s face it; language has rules. We linguisticians know that the rules are descriptive, not prescriptive, but they’re still there. And, as with any other game, knowing the rules helps you play better.
I don’t think it matters, necessarily, how you learn them… and the problem with rote learning is that you can end up just learning a routine, not the underlying principles. So, I’m not going to come out 100% in favour of sentence diagrams… but wee kiddies such as I was have to learn the rules of grammar one way or another, and if sentence diagrams work, I’m not going to knock them.
I wish I’d paid attention to it when I was taught it. Part of my problem with learning foreign languages is that when it comes down to it, I don’t really know this one. In French class I would hear about the French versions of certain parts of speech and I realized I had no idea what the English equivalents were.
And I know whoever mentioned Venn Diagrams isn’t coming donw on those. No one can say with a straight face that Americans don’t need to learn anything about logic…
Sometimes, when I’m trying to write a sentence that’s getting kinda fuddled, I’ll diagram it to figure out what I’m trying to express. It works.
My husband has very bad spoken grammar, and his writing is nearly incoherent. While he claims to have learned sentence diagramming in school, it is obvious to me that he only went through the motions, and never really did LEARN it. (He could not diagram even a simple sentence today.) I know that he is not alone - the people who were doing it to get the grade rather than using it to understand the language are the people who are complaining that diagramming never taught them anything. Well, no - if you didn’t bother to learn it, how could it?
Diagramming is the best way I know to figure out exactly HOW the language works. I also learned a lot about English by taking Latin, but there are a lot of idiosyncracies in English that don’t exist elsewhere.
Daddy likes to see his old threads brought back*. Does the heart good.
:mad: Daddy ain’t so fond of using his diagram-hatin’ thread for promoting diagraming. Shape up.
DaLovin’ Dj
*Happy Bump Day 
I had a string of subs in 7th grade, most left in tears. We got one tough bitch who could handle us, but didn’t know English for squat. We diagrammed sentences for two Nine Week periods straight. I got an “F” in the last quarter of English, I refused to do the same crap over and over. At the start of 8th grade, I look around in my English class, and it was a “‘Dog’ is a noun” level class. I stormed to the Guidance Counsellor, showed my standardized test scores (99th percentile, at the time) and got sent to the Honors Class. About halfway through the year, the teacher introduces DIAGRAMMING! A girl who survived my 7th grade class and I looked at each other and almost cried. We pleaded to skip that week. Mrs. Robinson threw up a mother humper of a tough sentence, and asked us to go to two seperate blackboards and diagram. No sweat. We went to the library for that period for a whole week.
Diagramming is a torture method that should be forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
Count me in as another victim (?) of so-called advanced or honours programs for brighter kids. I got to skip the boring drills and instead read piles of Canadian fiction and did calculus. But now I can’t diagram a sentence or multiply in my head. Learning French or German in college became more difficult because I had to learn the elements of grammar along with the language. Students in the lower level English classes learned such things as the difference between hyperbole and irony (well, OK, maybe they didn’t learn it, but at least it was presented to them). I never did. Sure, I can look that stuff up when necessary, but it bothers me that I missed the opportunity to have in taught to me.
rivulus
::runs away screaming::
Damn, I thought my school was the only place that subjected us to that movie. Now let me find something hard to hit my head against before I drag up any more memories of that “Language Arts” class…
Despite that movie we also diagrammed sentences - just the year I was in 6th grade though. However, I wouldn’t say it taught me English grammar. That’s what I learned in my German, Latin and French classes… My 11th grade teacher taught us all sorts of prescriptive English grammar, but it seems like the “understanding your language” stuff is more important.
I’m taking courses in Italian and Hebrew now and I’m still amazed how little most of my classmates actually understand about their own native language. My professor confuses people enough by saying “conjunction,” god forbid “subordinating conjunction.” But then, I love this stuff, and I suppose that’s why I’m a linguistics major… 
I learned how to diagram sentences in sixth grade. The school had this bizarre philosophy that everyone learns at the same rate, and that rate was the rate of the slowest person in the class. (The rest of us who claimed that we knew what an adverb was or that we had mastered 7*8 were faking it or lying. We really needed more practice doing the same thing over and over and over and over again.) And so we’d diagram simple sentences for weeks. Students who finished early were given more, usually easier, sentences to diagram. The way I was taught made sentence diagraming horrible, mind-numbing, annoying rote work.
I associate diagramming sentences with really bad teaching. But I must admit, I do know know a verb when I see one. That may have come from sentence diagramming or it may have come from much better grammar lessons from better teachers. And I also know that my ex-cow-orker, who never had grammar in school and who plans on technical editing in his free time, had managed to make it 35 years without ever hearing about parallelism.
What’s so interesting to me is that in the Olden Days, people would be saying ‘Learning Latin is the only way to learn English! Unless you can say it as Cicero would have said it, you don’t know it. I translate all of my sentences to Latin so I’ll know how to say them in English. (My wang is so literate he wears glasses. I call him Ovid.)’
Those same people tried (and failed) to make English grammar conform to Latin rules, blithely ignoring the fact that English has a highly positional grammar with little inflection (much like German), something that is entirely unlike Latin. (How many ways can you say ‘The farmer saw the wolf.’ in Latin? How many ways can you say it in English?) Mistaken ideals of ‘purity’ and ‘logicalness’ lead them to mostly ignore the very language they were trying to invent rules for. Prescriptivist Grammar at its pompous, arrogant, ignorant worst.
My point is that times change but the arguments really don’t. Being able to diagram a sentence is a neat trick and all, and might have some small uses in more important work, but isn’t going to clean up the sewer we call the ocean. Same with learning Latin a hundred years ago, and I bet many of our pro-diagramming arguments were used to defend Mother Latin when it was being given the old heave-ho by secondary education.
On review, English has much less inflection than German. We lost most of our inflection when English was being used as a creole language among different Germanic tribes on the British Isles. Drop nonsense as genders and moods and your language becomes so much easier to use. I think English is the least inflected of all European languages.
(Did I mention how much I love English? :D)
Drop nonsense such as genders and moods.
'E damns ye! God damns ye to hell, thou foul, vile, impertenent, typographically-imperfect drab’s whelp!
ZOUNDS!
Hated it at the time, but would be interested in improving my writing skills now…
I don’t know what any of this stuff is!!!
I can tell you what a noun is.
I can tell you what a verb is.
That is about it.
I too was in all of the honors English classes, and we NEVER actually studied the nitty gritty of the language. No one ever told me what the hell a semi-colon is, and I feel cheated! “Oh, well ee’s smart’un ee es. Likely ta just be absorbin the knowledge outa thin air! No need to tell eem about adverbs luv.”
All we ever did was read one freaken book after the other and answer questions, or write essays.
I was in honors English classes as well. I went to Catholic schools up until I graduated high school. When I was in grade school (1 - 8 grade), they had “Reading” class and “English” class. Reading class had different skill levels for different abilities. English class had one level that everyone was in. This was the class that you learned about nouns, verbs, adverbs, gerunds, sentence diagramming, semi-colons, etc. The advanced English classes there were the Reading classes, I suppose. Everyone had to study grammar, because the faculty knew that if you didn’t learn it there, where else were you going to learn it?
By the time I got to high school, it was the traditional, “oh, an honors student! Well, you’ve already figured out all the rules yourself, so you’ll just spend your time reading and writing essays!” I didn’t mind it, because I really DID learn my grammar in grade school, but many others I know didn’t.