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[johnslat]

except how to diagram sentences?

"The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. [1] His book, published in 1847, was called �A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.� His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and �rhetorico-grammatical figures,� and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as �that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.�

It may have been unwieldy, but this formidable tome was also quite revolutionary: out of the general murk of its tiny print, incessant repetitions, maze of definitions and uplifting examples emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. �A Practical Grammar� was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all.

Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for �a part of speech.� Sometime in the 18th century, teachers began to realize that practical skills were more useful to young people than classical languages, and that the ability to speak English didn�t necessarily mean that a student spoke it well, wrote it correctly or understood its structure. To teach it, they borrowed the concept of parsing from the classical tradition in which they themselves had been trained.

Put simply, parsing requires the student to break down a sentence into its component words, classifying each in terms of its part of speech, as well as its tense, number and function in the sentence.

Let�s say a teacher assigns a student the sentence �Virtue secures happiness��a likely specimen in 1847. The youth stands up, spouts something like, �Virtue is a singular noun and the subject of the sentence; secures is a regular verb, indicative mode, active voice, present tense, third person singular; happiness is a singular noun, object of the sentence,� and sits back down with a sigh of relief.

Parsing was almost insufferably tedious. It was also very difficult. And both these deficiencies were intensified by the way grammar was taught. Typically, students were first made to memorize definitions and rules, and only when they could recite them accurately by rote were they expected to apply them to sentences.

Stephen Watkins Clark was the principal at the Cortland Academy, where he also taught English. Like many schoolmasters, he was frustrated trying to beat proper grammar into the heads of his students by means of parsing. Mr. Clark was not the first reformer to identify its problems, but he was the first to solve them by arranging the parts of a sentence into diagrams. He didn�t consider the idea particularly radical. As he notes in his preface, making the abstract rules of language into pictures was like using maps in a geography book or graphs in geometry.

But there are differences. Maps and geometric diagrams are ancient; both go back at least to the Greeks. Geometry, of course, can�t be taught without recourse to geometric figures, and schoolchildren can draw a map of their classroom or their front yard without much instruction from the teacher. But making a picture of the sentences we read and speak every day was a concept with no real history behind it: it was invented not by an ancient on the other side of the world but in Mr. Clark�s study, in his classrooms, on long meditative walks around the town of Homer.

And, radical or not, it apparently caught on at the academy. His fellow teachers urged him to take it public, and he wrote the book.

Mr. Clark�s early diagrams were basically balloons, though they might be mistaken for a fleet of airships or a family of hot-dog rolls:

From �A Practical Grammar�Mr. Clark provided this diagram as a generic template for his students, with numbers assigned to different elements in the sentence.
Applied to the analysis of an actual simple sentence � 1 being the subject (noun), 2 the predicate (verb) and 3 the object � the balloons could be pleasantly straightforward:

From �A Practical Grammar��Virtue secures happiness.�
or unpleasantly convoluted:

From �A Practical Grammar��Our natural resources are developed by an earnest culture of the arts of peace.�
Mr. Clark�s balloons weren�t that easy to draw. Do you make the circle and then write the word inside it, or write the word and then draw a balloon around it? Either way, try doing it on a slate with a piece of chalk, and the noble sentiments Clark prefers for his models look like cartoonish nonsense:

Joe Mortis�Writing letters constitutes my most agreeable employment.�
�A Practical Grammar� went into several editions (my own copy, from 1860, is the 15th), but in the history of diagramming, the reign of the balloons was relatively brief. In 1877 two teachers � Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg � left them deflated on the classroom floor. Their book �Higher Lessons in English� finessed Mr. Clark�s bulky blobs into a system of lines and angles that were a snap to draw and took up less space.

Joe Mortis�Writing letters constitutes my most agreeable employment.�
The book was enormously popular, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Brainerd�s diagramming swept through American schools like a refreshing breeze. By the latter half of the 19th century, chalkboards had become increasingly common in classrooms; for students, the impact of watching a sentence take shape on that large surface as a comprehensible, often elegant, and sometimes downright ingenious drawing must have been significant. It�s hard to believe anyone but the most dedicated pedant could have actually enjoyed parsing, but plenty of students � including me � loved diagramming.

A century and a half later, diagramming sentences is even more out of date than writing lessons on a piece of slate. When the book I wrote about it was published in 2006, a couple of hundred people sent me e-mails. One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun. Another asked me for a date. Two objected to my political attitudes, as they deduced them between the lines. A dozen or so either faulted some of the diagrams or challenged me with a particularly tricky sentence.

The rest of the responses were eloquent, nostalgic and not unpersuasive laments for the lost art of diagramming, from people who blame everything from the death of whom to the end of civilization as we know it for its demise.

The question remains: Does diagramming sentences teach us anything except how to diagram sentences?

That particular can of worms is a subject for another post."

http://www.webcitation.org/mainframe.php

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/a-picture-of-language/

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

Tree diagrams aren't essential, but they may be one way of developing an understanding of constituency (i.e. of exactly what constitutes or makes up the er, constituents or parts of a sentence or utterance). It's probably easier though to just use boxes (as in Berk's English Syntax), slashes, or brackets. Edit: I myself only really learnt diagramming of a sort from university-level reading (Leech et al's English Grammar for Today), though the trees used were much "flatter", less obviously "binary-branching", such that they looked like multi-headed flat-bottomed straight-bristle brooms with at the lowest level each bristle making contact with a word/ultimate constituent, and each level down from the sentence level (<--- Se --->) applying just as clearly to less and less wide <-> part-item ranges across the page (linearly almost) as it did to their notional "hierachicality"; the form and function labels were thus more literal labels than in trees where e.g. right-branching design can distract the eye somewhat from the actual essentials. A mild-mannered English teacher from Africa had tried to introduce my secondary school class to the basics of parsing and simple diagrams, but was soon shouted down by those who had a disrepect for learning and doubtless felt threatened by anything at all "challenging" (but to me it felt kind of intuitive, dare I say almost easy, even back then). The poor guy quit teaching soon after that LOL.

With the quite spidery trees on page 4 of the following, one really would need to have also fully grasped the concept of 'node':
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=irXAKZSHc38C&dq=huddleston+grammar&source=gbs_navlinks_s

[Glenski]

I was taught in jr high and high school how to diagram sentences. It made things very clear to me. I hear that many places now in the U.S. and U.K. don't even teach parts of speech!

[btsmrtfan]

Me do I just but me that's.

[johnslat]

I think that I will never see
Sentences without a tree.

I MISS those trees

And I'm not even primarily a so-called "visual learner".


Regards,
John

[santi84]

I finished high school in 2002 and we were never taught parts of speech! Grammar was ignored and literary analysis was the focus.

I started my TESL university certificate in 2008 and we had an entire upper-level course dedicated to sentence diagrams. What did we learn? Well, we learned that the only student who could figure one out in the first few weeks was the Chinese international student

[johntpartee]

When I think of diagramming sentences, I'm always reminded of the scene in "Dead Poets Society" where Robin Williams starts his class reading from the school textbook about "how to enjoy poetry". The students are sitting there with slide rules and T-squares deducing whether or not a poem is any good. Williams stops and shouts "Rip it out!! WE'RE NOT LAYING PIPE!!"

[DebMer]

I think it was 7th grade when they were trying to teach us to diagram sentences. I couldn't wrap my brain around it, yet I was an above average verbal and written communicator. I think knowing how to diagram a sentence and knowing how to handle language correctly probably don't have a correlation, but nowadays I'm interested in all things language-related, so I'd like to learn how.

[Phil_K]

It depends on whether your students want to be linguists, or to speak English. I suspect the latter...

[Glenski]

[johntpartee]

Very true. However, just as one needn't analyze poetry to appreciate it, there's no need to unravel English to speak it.

[Sashadroogie]

Dear JohnTpartee

But there usually is for learners of English as a second language. Lots of unravelling going on there. Otherwise, how else to understand the difference between 'it is' and 'there is'..???

Sasha

[Sashadroogie]

...and I'd like to pipe up further that one usually appreciates poetry all the more for having analysed it. Akin to pulling delicate wings off a butterfly? Perhaps. But you'll never look at butterfly wings the same banal way again...

[johntpartee]

Yeah, okay. You really zinged me there, pal. You're great, I mean it, now get outta here.

[Sashadroogie]

'You're great, I mean it, now get outta here.'

I want a diagram of this, please. Anyone?