Sentence diagramming?

[nancylebov]

I was taught sentence diagramming back in the sixties. It was a tidy little thing that I wasn't bad at and I didn't mind it, but it seemed to be of no use. Since I had very little drive, I didn't care.

Recently, I've had a couple of friends say that they consider sentence diagramming to be important, and I've thought about what it might be good for. Maybe it's useful if you want to write a complex sentence. Maybe it's useful for sorting out other people's complex sentences.

So, were you taught sentence diagramming? Do you think it was useful, and if so, for what?

I do think it's important for people to know how to write clearly, and I don't know how it can be taught. What do you think helps?

There's a good, lively discussion happening on Facebook. Comment here or there.

https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02xuDx93EAJKamkgiZiAPvvr2Hu249A5CNgSvu6oksGMwbfGi5nHL7R5ju1GDvnft5l

Comments

[conuly]

I will direct you to LanguageLog's commentary on the subject. I do not care one whit for the opinions of people who do not even know what style of diagramming they're praising.

[conuly]

On an unrelated note, you could make your facebook link a lot shorter if you took away everything from ?notif_id onwards. In URLs, the ? indicates that you've moved past the necessary part of the URL and are now on the pointless metadata.

[siderea]

> In URLs, the ? indicates that you've moved past the necessary part of the URL and are now on the pointless metadata.

Hmmm, that is not universally true. These days, it is often true, especially of corporate sites, but there's nothing about how URLs work that make it necessarily so, and there are still platforms out there where specific pages are indicated by attribute-value pairs after the question mark.

The takeaway being: try truncating the URL to the question mark, and pasting the shortened version into a fresh browser window, and if it works use that.

Technical background: the structure of URLs was quaint the day it was invented, and hasn't gotten any more sensible with the march of time. The original idea was that the "www.domain.tld/" part specified the server identity, the "foo/bar/baz" part separated by slashes indicated the path to the file to be served on the server, and then optionally the question mark started a list of "attribute=value" pairs, separated by ampersands, for filtering results, presumably being extracted from the database. Approximately every part of this is terrible and now wildly obsolete. Domains don't map to individual servers, because no single box could handle being, for instance, www.amazon.com; so now in reality domain names are usually illusions propped up by whole armies of servers relating in complicated ways (LJ was a pioneer of this with memcache.) Actually exposing the file system organization to the general public by putting it in your URL is a security issue, and also works terribly for non-hierarchical page organizations (such as wikis), and constrains site organization to the file system organization which cramps one's infoarch style; so often the path part of the URL is also an illusion, sustained by a kind of server software called a contact management system. And as you've noted, those attribute-value pairs are away is passing information into the server which can be used for things other than filtering results, and now commonly are.

[sartorias]

In my decades of teaching, I discovered that diagramming, like any other tool, works for some learners. I had to teach it, and I tried to make it fun, but each time I taught it, I could see some faces lighting up when they got it, some looking back at me as if here was another boring toil that one had to do at school, and some utterly lost. It was nearly always the math minds who got right into it.

[carbonel]

I was a victim of the Roberts English Series, which meant I did not learn diagramming but rather transformational grammar. That was a process that turned sentences into morphemes -- linguistic units -- and applied various actions to them.

If it sounds familiar, it might be because Suzette Haden Elgin used the concept as the basis for her magic system in the Ozark trilogy.

[crystalpyramid]

I loved sentence diagramming, taking things apart to see the underlying structure. It's the same thing I loved about physics. No idea if it was useful, but I get the sense that the brains that do well in physics instruction aren't exactly typical.

[arlie]

I vaguely remember the existence of sentence diagramming, but the school system I attended didn't make much effort to teach any kind of formal grammar - for English at least. They did teach grammar in conjunction with foreign language classes, particularly Latin, but also French. To this day, I can correctly name tenses in French, German and Latin text (names for the french ones themselves in french; the other two in english). But don't ask me to recognize e.g. the subjunctive in English, and I might have to think to identify the future perfect.

According to my understanding of the theory of teaching children, this is utterly ass-backwards. But who am I to argue with the politically influenced experts who set the curriculum for the Protestant school board of greater Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s.

I don't think I appreciated sentence diagramming, when I encountered it. I already understood the relationships between words/clauses in sentences, though I don't think I'd been exposed to adequate descriptive language. (I was innocent of terms like "subordinate clause".) The diagrams seemed like a cross between a waste of time and something of a land mine - would I be required to ignore the obvious relationships between the words in favor of the Right Answer (TM)?

Silliness

[sturgeonslawyer]

In (approximately) 1972, I was taught sentence diagramming at Stetson Jr Middle School in West Chester PA, although I didn't live in West Chester, but in a tiny unincorporated are named Thornton, set between West Chester and the Delaware border, meaning we got to live in PA where there was, then, no state income tax, and do most of our shopping in DE, where there was no state sales tax; but I digress, if only to suggest that diagramming this sentence, what with its digressions and all that, might possibly be a challenge to anyone determined to diagram it.

My reaction? I thought it was kind of interesting, and it got me clearer on the structure of a basic sentence than I had been before. I think it is important for precisely that reason, but I've never found any other use for it. At any rate, it certainly beats trying to confine English grammar to a Backus-Naur form...

[madfilkentist]

I found that learning diagramming helped me to understand sentence structure, even though I rarely created written diagrams. When I was in college, I diagrammed the first sentence of "The Star-Spangled Banner" to show how complicated it was. (Everything through "gallantly streaming" is one sentence and includes a nested subordinate clause.)

[nancylebov]

On Facebook, someone brought up a verse from "The Night Before Christmas" as an example of a long, complicated sentence.

"As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof."

[ndrosen]

I don’t recall ever being taught sentence diagramming (I entered first grade in 1970). Aside from studying some grammar in English classes, I studied Latin, which taught me some grammar, and no doubt did wonders for my vocabulary and spelling in English, much as I disliked the ancient language, which I was never actually good at. I later studied German as well.

[pameladean]

I refused to read newspapers or report on current events in sixth grade social studies class -- I felt that I would still be a child until I turned thirteen and that it was unkind and unfair to make me read current events, which were all horrific (it was 1964-65). I got bad grades in social studies and consequently, in junior high was not allowed to take the "advanced" English and Social Studies block, despite having done very well in English. My mother stormed the principal's office several times, but they were adamant that those social studies grades were disqualifying

People in the "regular" English and Social Studies classes, always taught as a unit for some reason, were not to be taught diagramming sentences until eighth grade, so I wasn't taught that. At the end of the year they looked at my grades and bounced me into the "advanced" English/Social Studies block, which was a disaster, because I hadn't learned the things everybody else had learned in those classes in seventh grade. They had already had sentence diagramming and moved onto transformational grammar. At the time this was taught as a natural next step to diagramming, so I had no idea what the teacher was on about since I had not learned to diagram. I don't think transformational grammar, which when I was attempted to be taught it involved "treeing" sentences, actually requires any knowledge of diagramming, but the teachers were learning at the same time as the students, they had all been raised on diagramming, and that was how they taught themselves, too.

Years later I found a textbook that taught treeing without any reference to diagramming, and it was actually very useful both in figuring out sentences in Spanish and, later, Classical Greek; and in disentangling very long sentences in English literature. I treed the opening lines of Paradise Lost, which comprise one very long complex sentence, and learned a great deal.

P.

[calimac]

I didn't learn to diagram sentences or anything else about grammar in English class. All I know about grammar is what I learned when taking German as a second language.

[siderea]

Funny you should ask. In my eighth grade honors English class, the teacher started doing something on the board presupposing we knew how to diagram sentences and someone else volunteered that they had never been taught it, so she asked the whole class if we had been taught how to diagram sentences, and about a third of us replied that we hadn't. So the teacher said, "Eh, you're never gonna need to know this, so don't worry about it." And just dropped the topic entirely.

That was the entirety of my exposure to sentence diagramming in school.

I was slightly disappointed. Looked fun.

In any event I don't think I've missed anything, myself. My English grammar got about as good as a native speaker's can be just from the study of English, and then I took Latin which patched the remaining holes.

That said, just the other day I did find a circumstance I thought it might be applicable. I accidentally found myself looking into what the Internet had to say about the interpretation of a certain poem, and it became very clear to me a whole lot of people were having trouble interpreting the poem because they hadn't really realized they hadn't figured out what the subject of the sentence (it was a single sentence) was. If I were teaching an English class on that poem, I would step the students through the exercise of untangling its grammar, to reveal to them they didn't know to whom the verb referred, and then sic them on the project of figuring out which of several possible parties it was – rather dramatically changing the meaning of the poem, depending – and arguing for their no doubt various conclusions. I hadn't initially thought of using sentence diagramming for that, but I bet it would be a great assistance for many students.

[acelightning73]

I started first grade in 1951. So I learned sentence diagramming. I occasionally use it when I come across a sentence (as in a political statement) that I"m having trouble unraveling what it's supposed to mean. Too many public figures excel at obfuscation.

I don't know if knowing how to diagram a sentence makes a person's writing clearer. I just try to write as clearly as I can, largely because I have read a lot of books by people who wrote very clearly (RAH, Asimov, all the great SF writers who were scientists and engineers, who were used to writing with precision). I think the best way to teach good writing is to give people a lot of well-written things to read.

[nancylebov]

There's a bit in one of the Foundation books where a government offer gets analyzed, and it's established that the offer has no meaning.

[acelightning73]

I remember that, and thinking it was clever of Dr. A. to find a way to get sentence diagramming into a science fiction story.