- yes
- by the fourth grade definitely, maybe third. Sixth grade was the last year we had to do it.
- I didn’t learn anything from diagramming, but I looked at it as a puzzle so I found it mildly amusing.
- 3rd grade was 1989.
- private school, Memphis
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Yes
1a. Sixth
1b. In some ways* -
Mid-80s
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This was the one year at private, Catholic school. The public school didn’t teach it.
*At the time, I could see no benefit. I could pick the subjects, verbs, objects, phrases, clauses, etc. out of the sentences we were given without any difficulty. Diagramming the sentences seemed like a waste of paper.
Since then, there have been times where I would read a sentence, know it was wrong, and being able to do a think a basic diagram in my head helped me picture exactly what was wrong with it. (Taking Spanish helped, too.)
- Yes.
High school, junior year, I think.
I loved it! I’m a very visual/data-oriented person, so it was right up my alley. I love charts and graphs in general. It really helped me see grammar like I see math and science. (I’m actually better with grammar and punctuation than my writer husband…) Thanks, Mr. Frank!
2&3) Public school, rural OH, late 90s.
My answers:
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Did you learn to diagram sentences?
Yes
1a) In which grade, if you remember?
Started somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, all through elementary school
1b) Do you think it benefitted you in terms of understanding grammar?
Yes, very much so! -
Which years did you attend elementary school?
1972-1981, in Sacramento -
Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)?
Private, Catholic parochial school
Rhiannon8404’s answers: -
Did you learn to diagram sentences?
Yes
1a) In which grade, if you remember?
3rd grade, all through elementary school
1b) Do you think it benefitted you in terms of understanding grammar?
Yes, very much so! -
Which years did you attend elementary school?
1974-1983, in San Jose, CA -
Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)?
Private, Classical Christian school
We both had the same reaction when we saw this thread: “I **LOVE **diagamming sentences!”
No. I was lucky enough to avoid the teachers who taught it. I knew some other people who had to, and it always struck me as a pointless waste of time and paper. Then again, all formal grammar seems rather pointless to me. Sentences that don’t follow the rules sound wrong, and fixing them is a simple matter of playing with them until they sound right.
- Did you learn to diagram sentences?
Yes.
1a) In which grade, if you remember?
IIRC I first started diagramming sentences in 3rd or 4th grade and did it off an on through highschool english.
1b) Do you think it benefited you in terms of understanding grammar?
I believe that it was beneficial.
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Which years did you attend elementary school?
1981-1988 (for K through 6) -
Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)?
Public school in Omaha, Nebraska.
Yep, sure did.
4th, 6th, and 7th
Not spectacularly. It was more “of course” than “ooh, new concept”
1965-1972
public, mixture of city and county systems.
- Did you learn to diagram sentences?
Nope.
1a) In which grade, if you remember? n/a
1b) Do you think it benefitted you in terms of understanding grammar?**
N/A, but I think it would have done.**
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Which years did you attend elementary school?
Started K in 1978; finished 6 in 1985. Graduated high school in 1991. -
Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)?
Public school, in CA.
I wish I had been taught sentence diagramming, or any grammar at all, in fact. We were taught nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and that was pretty much it. Mind you, I was always in honors classes; I don’t know if they assumed we already knew the grammar, or if they just thought it wasn’t necessary. Most of my grammar is done by instinct, and I’ve often discovered serious errors (years later, of course).
So I have every intention of making sure that my kids learn quite a lot more grammar than I ever did, including diagramming sentences. Last year, I went to a lecture (by a favorite author and teacher) on teaching writing to kids, and when we got to the part about diagramming, she said that diagramming points out messy thinking. If you have a bad sentence, but don’t know what’s wrong with it, diagramming it out will immediately show you where the problem is; it’s the part that doesn’t fit into the diagram. I thought that was pretty interesting–it will be neat to test out the theory when my kid gets old enough.
I have a feeling that diagramming sentences never really caught on in Canada. I’d never even heard of it before the SDMB.
Public school (K-8) for me lasted from 1988-1997.
I believe you’re right, Kid A. I’m Canadian born and bred and have never heard of diagramming sentences. I took a look a the samples in the link above and they looked, erm, interesting. <still scratching head>
Never learned how in grade school. As a university linguistics student, looking at the link Asimovian provided, I’m a bit confused and dubious. How is rearranging a sentence in this way supposed to be helpful? I do see that it re-plots most sentences as strictly subject-verb-object.
- Did you learn to diagram sentences? Yes
a) In which grade, if you remember?
** I began to learn how to diagram sentences in the sixth grade, I believe, and continued to learn about more and more complex sentences through high school and a college grammar course.**
b) Do you think it benefited you in terms of understanding grammar?
I think that was probably part of it.
- Which years did you attend elementary school?
(Sounds of swirly harp music) 1949-1955.
Have you ever heard the word parse used instead of diagram? I believe that is what my father called it. He would have been parsing sentences in approximately 1917.
- I went to a public school. I graduated in the same building that held my first grade classroom. Most of my 35 classmates had begun first grade with me.
I’m assuming this refers to what we called “diagramas en árbol.”
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Yeeees. The first trees were just a few branches, in I think 5th grade (may have been 4th but I missed half my classes due to recurring tonsillitis so my memories of 4th are quite vague). The last ones in 12th required three Din A4s stuck together by the narrow side.
And yes, it helped me understand grammar a lot. Actually, I wish I was taught how to diagram sentences in the languages I learn as second language, because it would give me a vocabulary I currently lack and don’t even know how to acquire. Does anybody know what’s the English name for a “sintagma nominal con función adverbial, complemento de tiempo”?
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Uhm, First grade (the year you turn 6yo) was the 1973-4 school year. I’m not sure what grade does “elementary school” reach…
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Private, “the nuns”. There’s another nuns school in town but mine recently celebrated its 300th anniversary… uh, not so recently, it’s on 320 now, but who’s counting? Co-ed, high school was at the Jesuits, across the street and in town for about a century longer. Being “concertado” means that they have to follow certain rules that “completely funded by the parents’” centers do not need to follow (they have to fulfill all the requirements of the general study plan published by the government; they can enhance it but not take from it). I understand that the trees were a government requirement, everybody did them. Heck, the Spanish Language part of the government-given “university entrance exam” included a tree! 1/10 of the students do not pay tuition.
This is an on the fly tree, Spanish style. It probably contains errors, given that I haven’t done one in 21 years. Those are the usual abreviations, because that’s how you normally do it but also because otherwise I’d need a huge pic (which is why you use abreviations in the first place).
I have seen some like the ones in that example but UGH that’s yucky! As you see, ours have the sentence at the bottom, written normally, and then the “tree” over it. Any tree has the three basic parts “subject” “verb” and “predicado” (in Spanish the subject is often elidido, not said as part of the sentence because it’s implied in the verb; you would explicit it in parenthesis for the tree and indicate it’s (e)).
I think “parsing” would be similar to what we called “análisis gramátical.” You had to list the words and indicate the complete function of each.
Well, I can somewhat understand the tree that you use, but it strikes me as being far messier than what we use in English grammar. I suppose it comes down to what you’re used to, but I had enough diagramming drilled into my head that it’s very easy to determine what part of speech any given word is purely based on it’s location within the diagram. There is no need for any sort of labeling.
On the other hand, your method eliminates the need (or, really, the possibility) of reverse-diagramming. With the system we used in English, one who understands diagramming can figure out what the original sentence was, but sometimes, particularly in sentences with multiple clauses, it can be difficult or impossible to determine precisely what the original word order was.
Right, we never modify the original order. If you have a sentence with the subject at the end, it stays at the end.
There was that exercise once, where we had to diagram a freaking Gongora sonnet… no way you could rebuild something like that from the kind of diagram you showed!
Thanks Zoe, I was beginning to feel like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I did diagram, beginning in I believe 7th grade. I went to Elementary school from 1952 to 1960. I went to public school in a rural area. I thnk diagramming was very helpful.
I don’t think you can get things right by fooling around with them until they sound right, no matter how good an ear for grammar you have. But, I don’t think you can be a really good communciator unless you enjoy fooling around with language, including diagramming. So, fooling is fun but it helps to have some actual solid stuff down there to build on.
- Did you learn to diagram sentences? Yes
1a) In which grade, if you remember? I think it started in the fifth and sixth grades, but I only remeber it distinctly from the seventh and eighth
1b) Do you think it benefitted you in terms of understanding grammar? Not at all. It was a complete waste of time as far as I’m concerned
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Which years did you attend elementary school? I entered fifth grade in 1979
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Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)? Public
I’m with Carrot. I learned far more about English grammar from my high school Latin teacher than I ever did from all my grammar school and English teachers put together. The Latin teacher never tried to foist sentence diagrams on us, even though he was generally old school.
**1) Did you learn to diagram sentences? ** Yes
1a) In which grade, if you remember? Simple diagrams starting in 5th or 6th grade, more complex up through 9th grade (freshman year high school)
**1b) Do you think it benefited you in terms of understanding grammar? **Yes, and I always found it especially helpful when learning foreign languages because I had a great baseline of grammar terms and functions in English.
2) Which years did you attend elementary school? 5th grade (when diagrams started) was 1980.
**
3) Did you attend public or private school (or “other,” I suppose)? **Public