This question was asked in my daughter’s Grade 6 class. (I am quoting from memory)
They were given a short extract from “The Lord of the Flies” (btw am I using the quotation marks correctly – wouldn’t want to upset this OP )
Draw the following sentences so the meaning is clear:
The young saplings fledged the pink rock
She came to me and asked the meaning of the word fledged. Looking it up we found the following definitions:
fledge
–verb (used with object)
to bring up (a young bird) until it is able to fly.
to furnish with or as if with feathers or plumage.
to provide (an arrow) with feathers.
–verb (used without object)
(of a young bird) to acquire the feathers necessary for flight.
–adjective
Archaic. (of young birds) able to fly.
From what I could gather the word has to do with feathers and growing up. Neither of those definitions make the meaning of the sentence clear. If the author was using the word poetically the closest I can come is that the saplings looked like feathers covering the rock. Either way I think this is a bad example to use to teach the kids extra vocabulary.
If you really want to know, put a title of a book in italics, not in quotation marks. Use quotation marks for chapters of a book, or poems, or the titles of articles in a magazine or newspaper.
I think it means to draw a diagram or tree to clarify the syntax. However, all that you need to know to do that is that “fledged” is a verb with “The young saplings” and subject and “the pink rock” as object.
I’m actually thinking drawing the sentence might mean drawing a picture of what it expresses. But maybe my impression of what people do in sixth grade is a little off.
Yes but as others have pointed out you don’t need to know the meaning of “fledged” to diagram that sentence. Moreover, diagramming a sentence would almost never make it clear what the sentence means.
In some infrequent cases, it could help disambiguate between two different possible parsings, but it’s not as though it will help you grasp the meaning of the sentence if you haven’t come very close to pinning a few possible interpretations to choose from already. I mean, if you don’t know what “shoots” and “leaves” mean in the intended sense, then you’re not going to be aided greatly in understanding the sentence simply by learning that they’re nouns rather than verbs. If you don’t know what “blek” and “florge” mean, then a sentence diagram of “The blek florged merrily along” won’t tell you much at all about its meaning; indeed, most of us could diagram it without having any idea what it meant.
Colour ignorance fought: I’ve never come across such a term. I used to be told to deconstruct or show the elements or analyse (thank you, Mr Balme) the sentence.