When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a ...

I read an article last month about the lost art of diagramming sentences, a once-required skill that many American children had to master if they wanted to pass English back in the mid-20th century.

There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. The ...

What tools does a grammarian need? A brain helps, and so does a computer, but surely one of our most essential tools is some kind of diagramming system. How can we think about a sentence’s structure, ...

The recently revised Standards of Learning of the Commonwealth of Virginia consider sentence diagramming an “essential skill” and mandate that it be taught in grades 6-8. Frankly, if English teachers ...

On Wednesday morning at Christopher House, Kim Kerrigan’s students were pondering the mysteries of quotation marks. Inscribed on the board were two examples: 1. The father said, “I did not abuse any ...

When we first learned how to diagram sentences back in middle school, it was a total pain in the ass. The exercise was complicated and seemingly superfluous. How useful was scrawling a preposition on ...

For the pure geek of it, I challenged you to diagram a sentence from Mississippi State Senator Hob Bryan. He was arguing that Mississippi has passed plenty of laws against abortion already (update: ...

Robert, thanks for expanding the dialogue by disagreeing on diagramming sentences (you are far from alone). The important point, though, is that diagramming is just a metaphor (or perhaps I should say ...