Subject: What exactly is 'diagramming sentences'?
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Posted on: 2014-02-26 14:04:00 UTC
Coming from the English education system - or maybe a specific part thereof - I have no idea what's actually being discussed here.
hS
Since we are society that is, when you boil things down to the bone, all about writing, I thought this might interest some of you.
What do you all think? Personally, I can't really recall any point where diagramming sentences helped me get better at writing. You get better at writing by, well... writing. It doesn't help that some rules of grammar are based off of the structure of Latin and not really applicable to English (like ending a sentence with a preposition). Obviously grammar is important, but it's not something that can be easily forced.
It looks pretty, but I have to admit I still don't really get the purpose or what I'm supposed to be looking at, even after the explanation from Nesh and Wikipedia. Doesn't seem all that useful.
By which I mean, it flows from me naturally as I write, just like the writing itself. When my grade school teachers would ask why a word or sentence had to be the way I had answered, I would say, "that's what looks right." But they always needed some fancy reason for it, but that just confused me, because in my little kid head, correctness simply was what it was, there was no other possible way for that phrase to look! I knew it was right, I didn't need a reason!
It was especially bad with my second grade teacher, who (I learned years later from my parents) hated boys and was upset whenever I got questions right. (Boys are dumb, you see, and only girls are supposed to be smart!)
She values descriptive grammar (the fluid stuff) over prescriptive grammar (that whole school of rigid, fixed, wow the English language is regressing sorta thing).
In my AP English classes grammar was always a chore even though I've always loved writing.
In Stephen King's book "On Writing" when he mentioned grammar he brought up this mentality. You know--"Aw man I love writing but grammar sucks! Heck, I failed that one class in grammar way back when!" Can't help but wonder how this mindset might change if teachers did weave it into writing instead of treating it like a separate entity.
Coming from the English education system - or maybe a specific part thereof - I have no idea what's actually being discussed here.
hS
Basically, it's a method of visually identifying the grammatical bits (subject, predicate, object, verb, etc.) used in a sentence. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has more information on it.
However (coming from some part of the middle-class American public school system), I never had to do it, either. I had no idea anyone was actually using those things. I think of it as something my parents and grandparents had to do, but not my generation. Unsurprisingly, my ability to identify the more complex things like dependent clauses and subjunctives and predicate nouns at a glance is shaky at best.
... Which makes me a pretty good example for the article's argument, I guess. I was never taught grammar as its own thing, just through my English classes and lots of reading, and I picked it up very well. I can tell if it's right or not just by whether or not it fits in with all the professional writing I've absorbed over the years. If it's wrong, it clashes, like a sour note in a chord. And somewhere along the line I got into language and writing enough to learn extra rules on my own.
I bet that goes for a lot of us here.
~Neshomeh
I can see different states (and even different school districts in the same state, to an extent) having different requirements regarding the teaching of syntax. Me, I had to learn sentence diagramming in late elementary/early middle school. Never been asked to use it since, which is great because I doubt I could dredge up that info from wherever my brain has buried it.
And from thereon I never had do to it again.
Except now, when I'm taking linguistics and have to do a syntax tree, which is similar in that it breaks sentences down to their syntactical functions.
I would need to review before I could diagram a sentence now, but it was a required part of English class.
We had diagramming sentences for about one nine weeks session in Middle School, and I learned more about grammar in that session than I did in all other English classes put together.
I am an extremely visual person, so imposing that visual structure onto the sentence really made sense to me. I had only begun to really grok the grammar when the whining of the other students (and the complaining of their parents) got to the teacher and he dropped it.
I recall doing a little grammar in English lessons, but where I really learnt a lot about English grammar was during the Latin lessons we had in secondary school. As such a grammatically heavy language, it was taught 'by the grammar' rather than 'by the vocabulary' as per modern languages, and the teacher had to explain a lot of how things worked in English in order to begin translation. Part of that, I believe, was by diagramming sentences, even if that precise term was never mentioned.
None too surprisingly, most of the other students hated it and struggled to grasp it, because it was very technical. I loved it and excelled for the same reason. Those Latin lessons probably did my English grammar more good than English lessons ever did.
I remember the nightmare of sentence diagramming... I'm pretty sure my teacher thought I cheated on essays because I could form coherent (for a second grader, at least) sentences but always screwed up on diagrams of anything other than simple sentences.
I absorbed the proper rules of grammar over the years by reading almost anything I got my hands on, but I had to actively look up the proper terms for stuff like participles, direct objects, subject complements, and so on. Funnily enough, that's why I currently hold a 104% in Latin; I'm able to tell when to use the ablative case instead of the accusative. (Believe it or not, over half the class still mixes them up even though we covered it back in the first nine weeks.)
I took Spanish for two years and it was hard for me, mostly because the class focused on holding conversations between students. Obviously, none of us learned anything. The 'grammar before vocabulary' approach hasn't escaped most students; at least once every class, someone is guarenteed to say they learn more about English in Latin than they do in English. Maybe the school system needs to take a second look at their curriculum...
Honestly, diagramming sentences isn't very useful for most people (unless you happen to be a visually- oriented learner like someone said in an above post). In fact, I wouldn't go near grammar books for a long time after second grade, and only decided to venture back into those waters after one day in eighth grade when I learned about gerunds. I thought that verbs acting as nouns was so cool, I wanted to see if there was anything else like that.
(I didn't find anything, so gerunds remain my favorite grammar thing- ooh, I'm so technical- just because they seem to defy all other grammar rules.)
The homeschool program I am using now with my youngest child begins Latin in the second grade and teaches English grammar almost exclusively via Latin. The English grammar books are thin workbooks that aren't meant to take up much time, just to reinforce the differences between English and Latin grammars.
Though I am a product of the public school system, I am genuninely heartened when I hear of a parent homeschooling his/her children; I've heard how homeschooled children tend to do better than their publicly-schooled counterparts (especially with the ever-declining "standards" in the public schools, but this is no time to go into that).
As one who has taken a variety of foreign languages, including Latin, I can also join the chorus of people who say that they've learned more English grammar in Latin than they did in English. Little kids care nothing about arbitrary-looking rules. Make the material concrete, and it will be easier to swallow.