Diagramming sentances

[mmouse9799]

I loved learning to diagram sentences. It made grammar “click” into place for me. I rarely use it anymore, but think it’s a good tool to have. One thing it does very well is signify the relationships between words. Adjectives dangle off of the noun they modify and conjunctions are on lines connecting the words they connect in the sentance etc.

[Sir_Not_Appearing_on_This_Site]

Graduated HS 2001. Never had to do this. Only ever seen vague references to it.

[guizot]

I’m sorry to repeat myself, but the only people who can diagram a sentence correctly are those who don’t need to do it in the first place. Diagramming sentences is a crutch used by English teachers who don’t know what else to do.

[stargazer]

I never did it until my senior year of college, when I took Advanced Grammar. Because I’m a nerd and an English major.

I loved diagramming sentences. I thought it was really interesting, and I wish I’d learned it in elementary school.

[Sailboat]

@guizot

Do you have some kind of documentation that shows a decline in written communication skills among Americans?

You mean…other than the Internet?

[Cuckoorex]

@phungi

Is anyone aware of software that allows you to type in a sentence, and it returns a sentence diagram?

No, but I’ll do it for five bucks. I accept PayPal and most major credit cards.

[Arnold_Winkelried]

@Cuckoorex

No, but I’ll do it for five bucks. I accept PayPal and most major credit cards.

Why thank you. Here’s a sentence from Proust (Sodome et Gomorrhe, english title * Cities of the Plain*, fourth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu) - I’ll pay the $5 and throw in a tip.

Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy–at times from the society–of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

[Kyla]

Never learned. Went to public schools in California in the 80s and 90s.

I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on too much. I am really good at grammar now that I’ve spent a couple years as an EFL teacher.

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

First of all, I liked it when we did this in English class. I thought it was fun.

Second, yes. I am an editor. In the 70s I was a copy editor for a newspaper and one columnist (a Republican) often wrote sentences that were the approximate length of his entire column (which was 800 words). I would look at these monsters and say to myself, “Is that a sentence? I don’t think so.” Then I would diagram it to find out, so I could point and laugh at the columnist. Damn him, his convoluted prose almost always worked out to be an actual, albeit extremely complicated and laden with all kinds of clauses, sentence.

Algebra, I never needed again. Never.

[Der_Trihs]

Ah, diagramming sentences. Did it as a kid, hated it. And I felt it was a bad thing to focus on, since so many of the other kids struggled to read at all - I wondered why she was neglecting the basics for fancy stuff that I couldn’t see any use for.

@friedo

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.

That pretty much describes it, although to be fair it wasn’t “thousands”. It was just frustrating and baffling, since I never saw the point to it.

[Isamu]

I also studied it later at University (linguistics major) and I loved doing it.

By co-incidence I also use it in my day to day job all the time (I write patent specifications). I don’t draw out the diagrams, but I have an image in my head.

[Nava]

@Arnold_Winkelried

Why thank you. Here’s a sentence from Proust (Sodome et Gomorrhe, english title * Cities of the Plain*, fourth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu) - I’ll pay the $5 and throw in a tip.

Dearest Calliope, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polimnia and Thalia:

I would like to thank you for the fact that apparently none of my Spanish Language teachers were familiar with Proust, as the biggest sequoia any of them inflicted on us was a mere five DIN A4 long (stuck lengthwise, of course).

[Ichini_Sanshigo]

First the BBQ Pit, now MPSIMS. Diagramming sentences is totally in this month! I learned how in grade school. I’d transferred in to another school in 4th grade and everyone else already knew how to diagram. I’d never seen the technique before, and I was pretty much like WTF? But once I caught on, I found it fun.

[Gyrate]

Another diagramming veteran here, and I was in school in the early '80s. It was deeply irritating. I suspect the teacher made us do it to keep us quiet while she read a magazine.

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

Did it in junior high in the late sixties. An old Irish battleax of an English instructor force-marched us through sentence after tedious sentence, underlining subjects, double-underlining predicates, until we all knew (and detested) what she was talking about, and how a sentence worked.

TOTAL waste of my valuable time at age 12 and 13, until I got to grad school a few decades later and had to teach freshman composition, at which point it was a skill valuable beyond my comprehension. Never would have been able to teach those courses without being totally confident in my diagnostic skills. Impressed the hell out of the other instructors, including those on my Ph. D. examination boards. Yay, Miss O’Roarke!

[notfrommensa]

I diagrammed sentences in school. I don’t remember exactly when/where I did it however. Maybe 7th, 8th grade?

1-3rd grades - Suburbs of Wash DC Late 60’s
4-8th grades - extreme rural Vermont Early 70’s
High School - Moderately big town in Upstate NY Late 70’s

[Sunspace]

@Arnold_Winkelried

Why thank you. Here’s a sentence from Proust (Sodome et Gomorrhe, english title * Cities of the Plain*, fourth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu) - I’ll pay the $5 and throw in a tip.

Dude… your sentence needs paragraph breaks.

[guizot]

@Sailboat

You mean…other than the Internet?

Yes, because the result of the Internet is simply that more people are using writing to communicate–especially adolescents who don’t care about writing that much. They were just as bad or sloppy in their writing before the Internet; you just never got to see it to such a degree. In the past, only the people who were highly educated got published. The rest have always been there.

Writing is not a natural phenomenon, and it takes many years to learn how to write “proper” English, and many people just either haven’t learned to or don’t worry about it.

I read a letter once written by a professor at Yale, wherein he lamented the “decline” of the writing skills of his students. That letter was written over a hundred years ago. People have been complaining about the “decline of writing skills” for generations, as if it were some new thing. Most people always start off as “bad” writers. The more universal education and written communication become, the more you notice it.

In any case, diagramming sentences won’t make someone a “better” writer; it just shows that they know grammatical terms, and if they can do it, they don’t really need it. It’s a teaching crutch.