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.
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zvi and
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Date: 2023-09-04 03:21 am (UTC)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.