I took a compiler writing course in grad school, and designed a language and wrote a compiler for it for my dissertation, and my knowledge of diagramming sentences helped me design the grammar for my language. However, I’m not all that good with it, since in 7th grade we had this awful programmed learning book called English 2600, which taught me nothing despite the fact I worked through the entire thing.
Illinois, public schools in the 60’s -70’s.
I got hives just looking at the title of this thread.
I diagrammed sentences in 7th or 8th grade (so right around '93-'94) in a small Catholic school in Columbus, Ohio. It actually did show up again later when I took a course on writing well in college; the last lecture mentioned that really eloquent sentences tend to look like peacocks when they’re diagrammed (e.g., various parts of the Gettysburg address).
Of course it was much easier in my day, as we only had nouns and verbs back then.
I attended Catholic School in 70’s and 80’s. I loved diagramming sentences. I use the diagrams in my head to make sure I form sentences properly.
I take it for granted that everyone knows how to diagram sentences.
Diagramming sentences is best done when high on the fresh scent of mimeograph copies. Fresh blue mimeograph ink prepared me to survive Sister George’s array of diagrams.
Snnnnniiiifffffffffffffffffff. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Bonus if you could sniff it, then hold the still warm copy to your face. Yeah, bring on those sentences, Sis.
But I always wanted to talk like Yoda.
“To well diagram sentances, the dark side is that pathway.”
I did this in elementary school, and hated it.
Then I did it again in college, and thought it was really cool.
Well, yeah. That was an easy A.
Can someone who does or did it explain to me how it makes it any easier to understand the sentence structure? I never did it, but by reviewing that link, it seems as if you have to know what part of speech a word in a sentence is in order to put it in the correct place in the diagram. If you already know the parts of speech, why not just write them above the words on the same line? In short, does the diagram itself do anything to aid in determining the parts of speech?
No, you have to figure out the parts of speech first. What the diagram does is show you visually how each constituent part of the sentence contributes to its encompassing part, which is just another constituent part of a larger structure, and so on. (If you have a computer science background, think about recursive tree structures or a parser tree, which is really what a sentence diagram is.)
This page has some in-depth examples and explains the process in detail.
It’s not about the parts of speech, i.e. noun, verb, adjective. It’s about the structure of the sentence. You learn about modifying phrases and clauses, subjects and objects, and so on. That way you know why it’s incorrect to say “She gave the gifts to my sister and I,” or “Him and me went out last weekend.”
I liked it in school, and it turned out to be extremely useful in learning other languages.
I learned it when I was in high school, and as a journalist, I have used it to write good sentences that communicate well. Now as an editor, I have used it to communicate to budding Hemingways and Weltys why the piece of purple prose they penned was not a sentence at all.
They consistently respond with, “Wow, that makes it clear. I wish I had learded that when I was a kid.”
I don’t remember doing any grammar at all in school. Well, not in English. My first exposure to grammatical terms was in French. I wish I had been forced to learn grammar, since while I sort of know how sentences should be put together, I don’t know the terms or the rules.
Graduated high school in '97 in Toronto.
I still use it from time to time. I take a horribly convoluted sentence, diagram it and then put it back together correctly.
It’s particularly useful when editing someone who’s fallen into hopeless techno-speak and passive voice.
I learned my freshman year of high school from an ancient teacher 3 years past retirement. I didn’t mind it at the time, but everyone else used to groan. She didn’t do a good job of explaining the purpose behind the practice.
I always found diagraming to be helpful in understanding sentence structure and the parts of speech. It’s great for visual and spacial learners because the diagrams give them such a specific, concrete picture of something that can seem very vague. It’s great at showing the difference between phrases, independent clauses, and dependent clauses.
I used diagraming quite extensively in my 400 level grammar class where we deconstructed quite complex sentences. We also did just a bit less diagraming in my 200 level grammar course.
Well, I was just responding to what friedo said.
But you can figure out how a sentence is put together simply by reading it. I can tell you all of that information without drawing a bunch of lines, because I understand the sentence (completely) and I happen to know the terms. That’s my point. If you can understand a sentence, you don’t need to do a diagram, at least from the perspective of a student in an English class. And until you can write a sentence correctly, you won’t be able to diagram it correctly. It’s not like a sentence is some mysterious thing you want to use, but you can’t until you can describe all the complex goings-on inside.
Now, if you want to diagram the syntax of a language, in order to discuss how it is distinct from or similar to others, then I can see a point to doing it, but that isn’t what is supposed to happen in an English class (That’s a linguistics class.) And in any case, a better tool for figuring out “how a sentence is put together” is syntactic (pdf) trees.
However, if you enjoy doing it, then why not? Those who do are almost always those who have little trouble figuring it out from the start. Those who don’t, usually never really figure it out, and never really benefit from it. For this reason, I don’t see it as a very effective pedagogic tool, and probably why so few high school English teachers use it today. Too many students just don’t get it, and too few are helped by it (other than those who just like it)–most of all, it makes quite a few students hate English class.
I honestly think the real reason so many high school English teachers used sentence diagramming was that teaching kids to be critical thinkers, readers and writers is a very abstract, ephemeral task–it’s very difficult. English teachers wanted something more concrete that they could do, that would clearly be either right or wrong, like grammatical terms (as opposed to simply good grammar).
But if you need sentence diagrams to tell someone that a sentence is incomplete (or that the wrong case is used), then you’re using a $12 tool for a $2 explanation.
It was a nice visual shortcut to give an idea as to how sentences were constructed. When I went for my Masters, the professor had an even more complex model, which actually showed me some interesting things about the poem I was analyzing for class. So it can be a useful tool.
But the point of learning them is to understand the structure of a sentence.
Heck, you see questions here on the SDMB that diagramming the sentence would immediately answer.
Interesting comment, Lissla. I admit I didn’t quite understand English grammar either–at least, until I took it as part of a linguistics course in my undergrad, and at the same time, studied Russian grammar, where I was basically forced to compare the grammars of English and Russian. Somehow, my eight years of studying French didn’t do that. And, I am also a product of the Toronto school system, graduating from a Toronto high school in 1979.
When I started high school, we did have an extra English class each week, in which we were supposed to learn grammar. I say “supposed to” because it was No. 1 on the “classes to skip” list. Perhaps because of that, the Toronto Board of Education did away with the extra English requirement in about 1975 or 76. I’ll admit now that unlike my peers, I didn’t mind it at all. It was interesting. But even for the one year I had to take the extra English, we never diagrammed sentences. We underlined the subjects, and double-underlined the objects, and wavy-lined the verbs, and so on; but we never diagrammed sentences as in the link from the OP.
Oddly enough, I ended up teaching English grammar for a number of years at a community college in Toronto.* My students were wannabe-writers, who needed to know written grammar. But even then, we did not diagram sentences. Perhaps it is an American thing.
*At least one Doper was one of my students; should that Doper wish to identify him- or herself and attest to what we did in my class and how we did it, I don’t mind if he or she steps forward. I believe I am still bound by the College’s privacy policy, so I cannot identify that student (even by gender) and ask for a comment.
Well, I suppose if someone really needs a diagram to understand such basic grammar points, I wouldn’t be one to begrudge him it. I still believe that if he couldn’t grasp the meaning of the sentence (“Only a fraction of the claims has…”), he’s not going to be able to diagram it correctly. He’s going to make claims the head noun.