Remember this little slice of hell in English class?
Has anyone ever had a need to diagram any sentance since learning this nonsense? Did anyone actually learn anything from this? Or is it all a part of a vast conspiracy to torture school children during their youth?
I just remember standing up at the board and randomly assigning words from a sentence to any intersecting line that I thought it would pass Sister Adolf Hilter’s rheumy gaze.
Is this still being done in schools ? I haven’t seen it yet in either of my children’s curricula, then again, they are public school heathens to my vastly superior catholic edumacation.
Of course I remember it, and of course I haven’t had to use it since, but then that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point was to show the grammatical relationships so that hopefully you wouldn’t grow up to sentences write this like.
Wow, we never did that. I never even knew those things existed. When I’ve heard about “diagramming sentences,” I always thought it meant what we did, which was underline the subject, double underline the predicate (or use some other way to identify it), identify direct and indirect objects, parts of speech, etc.
Everything was on the same line. There were no weird geometrical things.
It was always easy for me, but from my quick glance at the link, I can see how that diagramming stuff would be annoying. Not intuitive at all. I graduated from high school in 1990.
I did this, but then, I was in a Catholic elementary school in the 60s. My daughter, who is in her last semester in college, never diagrammed.
Sadly, her elementary school embraced “Whole Language” so she can’t spell to save her life. And I restrained my instincts to teach her properly, ceding to the teacher. :smack:
I graduated from high school in 2000, and diagrammed sentences my freshman and sophomore years. It seems North Carolina high schools are, shockingly, behind the curve.
I loved diagramming sentences. It’s not helpful in an English-only environment, but I remembered it and found it helpful when I started studying linguistics and other languages in college.
I never learned it, but I certainly plan on making my kids learn it (then I get to learn it too!). Diagramming illustrates the underlying structure of a sentence–it shows how it works, just as with any diagram for a piece of machinery. If your sentence doesn’t make sense, you can diagram it out and see just where you went wrong. The same thing happens when you outline an essay to show its structure; you can identify problems in the contruction of the argument and fix them.
My grammar is all blind instinct, and it makes for writing that isn’t very confident. I want my kids to know what they’re doing.
They didn’t teach this when I went to school, but I stumbled upon a book on the subject by accident when I was in college. I tried a few of the exercises and found them to be a helpful tool. Deconstructing sentences that I found “in the wild” gave me a lot of insight into English grammar and composition. I also found that most good, concise, clear writing had easy-to-diagram sentences, while poorly-organized, scatterbrained and obtuse writing was filled with sentences that spawned monstrosities. (Even very simple sentences can be difficult to diagram when they suffer from ambiguity.)
Noticing these things, I have applied diagramming to my own writing, often throwing out sentences that I can’t diagram clearly in favor of better ones. The net result is that my writing and re-writing improves.
So, you might have figured out that I am a fan of the process. I can imagine it would get quite tedious in school if the teacher just made you draw diagrams of thousands of sentences without explaining the purpose of the exercise or doing any analysis, though.
Oh wow, I totally remember doing that in school. And I totally hated it. I never got why they taught us this, but looking back, yeah, it was probably just to teach the way words associated with each other. Or something. Bah.
I don’t think it’s the diagramming itself that helps you write better, certainly not with me. I’ve never found it necessary to diagram a sentence to see that it could be better written. A person who can’t see that a sentence needs rewriting probably isn’t going to know when a diagram is “simple” or “not.” In other words, it’s the same awareness. I think most people (especially English teachers) like it because it reaffirms something they already know–they just didn’t have all the terms down before.
Diagramming sentences–especially those that someone else has written–is a really inefficient why to learn to write. For example, diagramming sentence 24 in and of itself doesn’t tell you that the adjective conducive should be attributive. Besides, diagramming sentences never goes beyond sentence level. It has absolutely no way of teaching discourse cohesion. Reading a lot, however, will teach you such things, and much more efficiently. (In the same way, looking up words is not how you learn the vast majority of your vocabulary.)
Diagramming sentences isn’t supposed to teach discourse cohesion; it helps you figure out how the sentence is put together. Nor is it supposed to teach you everything about how to write. It’s a tool in a toolbox full of different tools.
“Discourse cohesion” would be practiced by outlining paragraphs and essays, to find out the structure of the argument. Almost the same skill, but on a larger level–and again, a tool in a toolbox.
Of course reading a lot is extremely important, but as a lifelong reader, I can tell you that reading a lot will not teach you everything you need to know about grammar, usage, and so on. Unless you’re reading grammar and usage books too, of course.
