It wasn’t till I took an advanced Grammar class in college did I even learn what sentance diagraming is. It just struck me as something that should be in every grammar students workbook. I mean it really REALLY helped me spell better and get a better grasp on the mechanics of english.
SO my question is, when did they stop teaching this to kids, and why? PLEASE TELL ME NOW
I had it in the eighth grade (ca. 1995).
It must’ve been the around the same time they stopped teaching sentance spelling.
would you beleive my spelling has gotten better? :wally
While we’re looking for the answer to sentance diagramming, let me express my displeasure of schools no longer teaching phonics. mi cidz kant spel wurth a chit
Heh. Speaking seriously for the mo, I can’t specifically recall diagramming being taught to me in Grades 1-6 (1975-1981), but it must have been promulgated somehow. I have clearer memories of episodes of Schoolhouse Rock.
If grammer has gone to hell in recent years, I’d suspect less vigourous correction in high school. After all, it strikes me as unlikely that someone composing a sentence would build the structure and than slap in the words like playing Mad-Libs. More likely, they write a sentence that expresses the concept, then revises if it doesn’t sound right, with the standard being instilled by one’s teachers.
My teachers were lazy and wordy.
We were taught *parsing * when I was in sixth class at school (that’s the class when students are around 10-11 years old). Is that the same as sentence diagramming? By *parsing * I mean being given a sentence such as:
The boy has given his book to his sisters.
and then having to go through each word in the sentence and describe its grammatical function:
The: definite article
Boy: noun, third person, singular number, masculine gender, subjective case, subject of the verb has given
Has given: verb, finite, transitive, third person, singular, perfect tense, active voice, indicative mood
etc
Given the quality of written work I see nowadays from university graduates, I doubt very much that it’s still taught in schools.
I make my students parse sentences–prose the first semester, poetry the second. They bring in favorite quotes and have to scavenger-hunt points in them by identifying gramatical, syntactical, and (second semester) poetic elements.
I also make them parse words on their vocab quizes–they have to fill in the missing word in the sentence, and identify the part of speech/function.
I find this does the same thing as diagramming, but takes less time to teach/implement–and I don’t have time, since I am teaching Juniors.
Honest to God, I’ve found this method to improve their writing as much as the direct writing feedback I give them. It forces them to pay attention to the structure of language in a way most of htem never have before, and it shows up it their writing.
MonkeyMule writes:
> I mean it really REALLY helped me spell better . . .
How could sentence diagramming possibly improve someone’s spelling?
I did it in 7th grade, which was in 2001, but I don’t think most teachers at my school did it. I found it kind of interesting, but I don’t think I learned anything I didn’t already know… just a different way of writing it down.
I was taught sentence diagramming from about 6-9 grades. I liked it because it basically turned a boring English class into something resembling a Math class.
Neither can you.
For the three years I’ve taught, I used sentence diagramming in the second and third. It had a marked effect on my students’ writing ability. Next teaching job I have, I’ll continue doing it. I’ll also look into parsing.
It is a total waste of time for students who already know what they are doing. Frankly, I heard what it was in the 6th grade, look blank, and then proceeded to do it perfectly.
Unfortunately, it also gave too many mediocre English teachers the feeling that they had a complete grasp of the rules of the language. The diagramming notation as I was taught it in grade school and high school is, in retrospect, really rather crude (based upon my current perspective as someone who has worked in computer algorithms for parsing natural language) and does not really do a good job of covering many common constructions (e.g., disjunctive adverbs that modify an entire clause, such as “hopefully”, “mercifully”, or, as in the opening sentence of this paragraph, “unfortunately”).
The all-too-common response by the typical teacher is to either try to force the sentence into a structure that can be diagrammed even through it is incorrect, or to use the inability to find a diagram as “proof” that the contruct is improper. There may well be a richer set of notations available for the true masters of grammar that would enable them to diagram any sentence, but the diagram set I was taught is a disservice to the richness of a real language.
I loved diagramming, and still use it (in my head) when working out modifiers. Occasionally I find it useful too, when I’m editing someone else’s work, to track back to the subject of one of those gawd-awful run-on sentences some writers are fond of producing. I learned it in 7th grade, age 13, which would have made it (ulp) 1965.
OK, I’m older than I type. 
–BookReader
I studied it my sophomore year of high school. I’m still not sure what it is.
Back in the 50s, we started reading with phonics in 1st grade, and started sentence diagramming/parsing in 3rd. And most of us turned out to be excellent spellers with excellent grammar skills.
Chefguy ! is \ baffled.