There was a thread on this about four years ago, but I figure we could use a poll.
I learned sentence diagramming in elementary school – either in fourth or fifth grade. Apparently, I learned what is known as the Reed Kellogg System. I was discussing this with a coworker earlier this week who had never heard of sentence diagrams. And in a subsequent conversation with my wife, she had known diagramming as just writing a sentence out and then identifying below it the various parts of the sentence, but not the elaborate diagrams I’d done as a kid.
So I’m curious about who learned what when it comes to sentence diagrams. Feel free to elaborate on your own personal hell.
Oh hell yes. And I loved them. Still do. Currently teaching my husband to do them, because he’s dyslexic and never mastered basic grammar because he was having too much trouble just reading at all. It seems to be helping him because it’s all nicely visibly relational.
He commented that it was like long-division for English - people who “get it” probably would rather be hit with a hammer than do them regularly, but for people who don’t instinctively understand, it helps a lot to have things nailed down visually. I just liked them because it was fun to take really complicated sentences and see what weird-ass-creations I would end up with.
Apparently I learned the Reed-Kellogg system; it was fun, but English was usually pretty easy for me. Don’t think we did it every year–but it was an elementary school thing.
Where & when was it in fashion? I graduated high school in 1966–count backwards. In Texas…
I graduated in 1993, so it’s obviously stuck around for a while. My teacher was considered really hard core. Hated her at the time, but I really appreciate her now. She really got me to focus on and understand grammar.
I recall a brief series of lessons on sentence diagramming in 7th grade, but nothing afterward. I don’t believe it was anything more formal than learning how to label the subject, verb, and object, then dividing the whole sentence between subject/predicate.
I learned Reed-Kellogg in high school, but in graduate school we used a different method (probably the professor’s own – he used his own phonetic transcription scheme instead of IPA) that actually showed some interesting things about the sentences that Reed-Kellogg missed.
Probably learned it in about 7th grade, but didn’t understand it until about 9th grade, when suddenly the entire structure of the English language was revealed to me in a flash. Honestly. One moment in class, I’m the class idiot. Next moment, it’s all clear. It was truly a revelation.
I never did the Reed-Kellogg kind in school. I asked one of my English teachers about it, and apparently it was considered too advanced or too complicated to bother with, even though at the time I really wanted to learn how to do it.
But I did learn constituency and dependency diagramming in my college Linguistics classes. I love grammar and sentence diagramming! It’s fun.
I was taught this in sixth grade, and again in eighth, but utterly failed to learn it. When I took Latin, I learned to break sentences down and figure out how each word and set of words relates to the sentence as a whole, essentially what diagramming does, so I chose “non-graphic method.”
Our 6th grade teacher taught us diagramming that appears to have been Reed Kellogg, although I don’t recall the name. He was brave. Diagramming had become forbidden from the classroom for some reason, which I still cannot fathom.
I graduated high school in 1981 and did most of my diagramming in Catholic grade school using the Reed Kellogg system even though we didn’t know it was called that. In high school I think we focused more on writing papers. I loved doing it and often still diagram sentences in my head. I wonder if people who like math are more inclined to enjoy this.
I did diagramming and the Reed-Kellogg examples in the Wiki page look awfully familiar, so I voted “R-K” for the win. And I found them rather easy… wasn’t perfect at them, but I didn’t look upon them with fear and loathing like some of my classmates.
