We started sentence diagramming in 3rd grade and continued until the 8th grade. I have always hated it but like basic math, I wish we had done WAY more of it.
Mastering a skill involves learning the underlying concepts and the vocabulary to discuss the subject intelligently.
I learned Reed Kellog in about the fifth grade. It never seemed much of a problem or a help until I got to Latin. It made Latin much easier.
I had the opposite experience. I had trouble with English grammar until I took two years of Latin. That’s when I had my epiphany. Curiously, ever since then I’ve also been very facile with languages.
I learned Reed_Kellogg with the basic sentence “Dogs bark.” as the one sentence my fifth grade teacher ever used. She’d just add words/parts of speech, but always built on “Dogs bark.” (Adjectives: Brown dogs bark. Adverbs: Dogs bark loudly. Articles: The dogs bark. Prepositional phrases: The brown dogs bark loudly at the cats.) I can’t think of diagramming sentences without looking for the words that stand in for “Dogs bark”.
I might also mention that I was good at this until I took Latin in high school. Then I became excellent at it. I am probably an editor today because of Latin.
I remeber learning but have never used it since. It’s must not have been very useful in real life.
Sort of like learning all the vocabulary terms in math. I was a wiz at math and took several college physics and calc classes. But to this day I couldn’t tell you what a whole number is, or an integer, real number, natural number, etc.
I learned the Reed Kellogg system in Catholic grade school in the sixties. Since I read a lot and understood grammar without much effort, diagramming sentences seemed easy and somewhat pointless to me. Many years later, in my early fifties, I completed my bachelor’s degree. The university I attended seemed to like collaborative writing assignments. The writing of many of my younger classmates caused me to think that they really didn’t understand how the components of a sentence work together. I wonder if there is anyone here who had the experience of having the practice of diagramming make grammar and sentence structure seem clearer?
We did sentence diagramming my freshman year in high school; I don’t remember encountering it in any other year.
I really do think it helped me understand how grammar works and why, and what part each word and phrase plays in a sentence—though I could be mistaking correlation for causation.
Good post for the user name.
I’m another Brit who wasn’t taught sentence diagramming. I find it really hard to understand exactly what it is, too. Dogzilla’s example is clear but how is this made into a diagram? Please explain as to someone very very young and a bit dim, as all other explanations I’ve seen seem to start from premises I don’t know either.
Nope. We’d be given a sentence and then we had to write down what the subject, noun, verb, etc. was, but never in a diagram form.
Canada, elementary school in the 90s.
I learned the Reed-Kellogg system (this would have been in the mid 70s–I had no idea what it was called, though). I hated sentence diagramming. Way to make a subject which I absolutely loved tedious and boring (I felt the same thing about grammar rules and the names of various grammatical constructs–I was/still am kind of a “natural” at grammar: I can do it correctly almost all of the time, but I couldn’t describe the difference between different cases or explain all that “past perfect” and “subjunctive” and similar stuff if you put a gun to my head. It just goes in one ear and out the other and even to this day I have not had an epiphany that makes most of it stick).
I picked other, it might have been a watered down version of Reed-Kellogg, though. I vaguely remember our diagrams in school went up while the ones on that page go down.
Eh, I don’t have many opinions on it. I remember it being fairly easy, but somewhat tedious. I had a good intuitive grasp on grammar as a kid, so while I learned to diagram sentences, I wasn’t learning grammar – that I already knew.
In math, which doesn’t come easily to me at all, to this day I find it helpful to “show my work” even for the simplest problems, because I need the visualization to cope with it.
That’s an easy one.
That’s a slightly more complicated one.
That’s the type I ended up doing for fun because I got a kick out of it.
Basically, you start with an empty line, and you put in your subject (vertical break) verb (diagonal break) object all on that one line.
Everything else in the sentence is “modifying” one of those three things, so you draw a diagonal line under whichever part you’re modifying, and stick the extra stuff down below it.
If those modifiers are complicated, they also get put into another line of subject-verb-object, and then you draw lines under with more stuff under each of those again. You keep sticking modifiers in appropriate places until all of the words from your original sentence are accounted for.
Only at my Montessori grade school, as the more advanced Montessori method stuff was based on older teaching methods. It was a simpler style, however. It had to be–you had to be able to do it with special cards on a matt as an object lesson before you learned to write it down.
From the examples given, the basic difference was that you didn’t use any symbols to separate subjects and predicates, and every important word was circled. Also, you could wind up drawing the modifiers both above and below the basics. I also seem to remember that direct and indirect objects were treated equally, but that may not be true.
learned it in third grade which is '88-89.
Tree diagrams, Spain.
The Reed-Kellogg system looks like it’s destructive analysis: by forcing certain items into certain positions, unusual grammatical structures are shattered rather than put on display. Tree analysis respects the original word order (search for “Figura 1” in the link; the one I was taught is the diagram on the left).
I never learned it. At one point in middle school (?), our class was supposed to have it on the final exam, so it was taught. For one day. A day before the test.
Nobody saw the point, including (I think) the teacher, and it was a little late to drill it into us, so the idea was scrapped.
The method I was taught analyzes the function of every word and group of words within a sentence, and identifies them and their relationships in a graphical way. The R-K method appears to involve reordering the words so that the subject is always first; ours didn’t, but then, in Spanish we often don’t even have an explicit subject (there is a subject but it’s not said).
Were you taught how to identify the subject, and the verb, and the direct and indirect objects? Then you were taught what the OP calls “diagramming in a non-graphical way”, which I’d say is a contradiction in terms.
Yep got to learn all about sentence diagramming in 8th grade, this would have been in the late 90s. For the final project we had a to diagram the first sentence of the declaration of independence. Fun times.
We were introduced to it in the third or fourth grade (late 70s) but only spent a day or two on it. It wasn’t really drilled into us and nowadays I would be unable to diagram any but the the simplest sentences.
I didn’t know it was Reed-Kellog at the time, but yes I learned that as a freshman in high school. I didn’t care for it and I have never had any use for it since.