LOVED it. I’d diagram sentences for fun.
Hi, Spoons!
I remember diagramming sentences in grade 8, in the hell-school known as Whitby Senior Public School. I only have one memory of it, of the teacher using different colours of chalk to underline different parts of the sentence: pink and wavy, green and straight. On rereading, Spoons’ description sounds about right. I don’t think we did any branches.
I don’t remember any of what they actually taught about this though in grade eight. I may have already picked it up from experience; I had already been through books like The Hobbit (read in grade six when I was off for a month due to an eye operation).
:: flash ::
OMG!! So that’s where they got the idea to put those green and red wavy underlines in Word! I’m going to be even m ore twit chy about it n ow
THUD
:: falls off chair ::
[sub]And as for Spoons’ classes and teaching style, they were good. But then I like this kind of stuff. [/sub]
Hello, Sunspace! As long as you remember the Basic Formula that I taught you… 
Ummm… y = mx + b?
:: blush ::
S = … Naw, I’ll let you look it up in your notes. Remember though, that I can always call the College… 
Hey, I won’t be the first one to drop out of school and become a businessperson…
I diagram sentences in the back of my head, just as I convert spoken phrases to the ideal representation in IPA characters when people speak. For some reason I can’t for the life of me remember what someone’s name was, or what they looked like once I’m no longer looking at them, but you can’t have everything! 
As has been said, the purpose of teaching the diagramming of sentences isn’t the diagramming itself, but to understand how a proper sentence goes together. It’s a teaching tool, like memorizing the multiplication tables, writing book reports, and taking tests. Adults don’t do any of those things, but they were necessary to lock certain skills into your brain as a child.
The abandonment of traditional English-teaching methods is erroneously based on a series of studies released in the 1960s and 1970s that allegedly proved that “skill and drill” grammar exercises don’t improve the writing skills of high school students. The result is the not-so-slow but oh-so-certain decline in written communication skills among Americans over the past three decades.
Do you have some kind of documentation that shows a decline in written communication skills among Americans?
Is anyone aware of software that allows you to type in a sentence, and it returns a sentence diagram?
Diagramming sentences is not a lifelong skill; it’s a teaching tool. It can be useful for teaching children about sentence structure.
It was a wonderful tool for teaching kids and giving a visual to the idea of direct objects and predicate adjectives (“hitting” a wall for direct objects and “pointing” with predicate adjectives, for example).
I diagrammed many, many sentences in middle school, junior high, and high school. I still do sometimes just to make sure I don’t forget how.
Thanks for the link! I am off to waste time there, now.
Like this? It gives trees rather than the sentence diagrams you’re used to, but that’s how we probably ought to diagram sentences anyway.
I also attended Catholic school in the 70’s, learned sentence diagramming there, and still love it…
I gave **Rhiannon8404 **this book for Christmas last year.
Exactly! The trouble with trying to explain a bad sentence to the person who wrote it, is that they wrote it, so it makes perfect sense to them.
Show them a diagram with adjectives hanging off the subject, adverbs hanging off the adjectives, a subordinate clause hanging off the predicate, and prepositions dangling all over the place, and suddenly it all becomes clear to them.
Toronto area schools '60 - '72. The first time I’d ever heard about diagramming sentences was here, actually. We did use underlining (or something) back in grades 6 or 7.
If anyone is looking for some cheap thrills and wants a sentence to diagram, I was hoping to bust on a friend for posting the following:
(Heavy sigh) Learning how to diagram sentences is an excellent way to learn how to write. Colleagues of mine at the University of Northern Colorado (I’m a graduate student in the English Department) tell me that the old-fashioned grammar and linguistics drills of the 1950s and 1960s are coming back into fashion. The ability to construct complex, compound and complex/compound sentences depends of first being able to master the syntax of the language, and that is best done by teaching children to diagram sentences.
We did it all the time in the late 50s-early 60s. I loved it and was very good at it.
The way we diagram sentences in Spain is completely different from the way it’s done in the US, as I learned in a previous thread which my search-fu can’t find. Our way (the tree ultrafilter linked) doesn’t deconstruct the sentence completely, like yours does. When we diagram a sonnet it stays a sonnet.
I’ve found it useful when learning other languages: I have only drawn an actual, physical “sentence tree” a few times when I was discussing grammar with another student or the teacher, but I’ve used the mental toolbox many times. I’m currently in a trilingual environment and some of my coworkers have drawn parts of a tree a couple times when I asked them “which is the subject?” (verb-subject mismatch is one of our plagues, language-wise).
Knowing the difference between direct and indirect object, or active and passive voice, has definitely been useful. Grammatical analysis is a tool to help learn and demonstrate those concepts.