My life sentence? Diagramming.
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Taking clauses apart taught me to appreciate the architecture of language. It also made grammar feel less like homework and more like a puzzle.
Linda Bleck Play Pause Share Shared content is always free to recipients. Copy link Copied! Font Size Share this story Copy Link Link copied
At the university where I teach, an edict recently went out in another department – which shall go nameless to protect the guilty – that teachers were no longer to correct students’ grammar. I was, in a word, aghast. Of course, I was molded in a different environment – a parochial elementary school at the acme of the baby boom. (There were 60 children in my first grade class and one solitary, long-suffering teacher.)
In that strict environment, if anyone had dared to suggest that grammar didn’t matter, it would have been a capital offense. As such, it was drilled, drilled, drilled into us that grammar was the foundation on which clear, accurate, educated expression was built.
It was in fourth grade that things got serious. One day, the teacher walked to the board and began to teach us how to diagram sentences. Yes, diagram sentences, a practice that is almost unheard of today. But even at the tender age of 10, I was fascinated by the idea that a sentence could be illustrated. As someone who liked to draw, I was all in.
Sentence diagramming might seem like a relic of the classroom, but for our essayist, it imparted a lasting lesson in making every word count – and an unexpected appreciation for the structure and beauty of language.
The concept is straightforward and mechanical. Basically, you separate out the different parts of speech (do people still know what “parts of speech” means?) – subject, verb, articles, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc. Now, the fun begins. You draw a horizontal line, and then a short vertical line dividing that first line. On the left goes the subject, and on the right the verb. Then, branching off from the horizontal line, as many diagonal lines as are necessary for the articles, modifiers, and direct and indirect objects. Phew! Didn’t I say it was fun? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes.
Example sentence: Horses in the lovely pasture graze after sunset.
You can imagine how complicated things get when it comes to more sophisticated sentences. The diagram becomes a daunting network of lines and words, looking something like the transit map of a large city. And yet the principle is the same, as illustrated by my humble example above.
Now, the plot thickens. By fifth grade, diagramming sentences had graduated to a form of discipline in my school. If one was a bad boy or girl, they were sent posthaste to the board, upon which the teacher, Mrs. Shaw, had written a sentence to be diagrammed. There was no relief from the shame until one had succeeded. The thing is, I enjoyed the exercise so much that, for me, it was not so much a punishment as an invigorating challenge. I seemed to have a knack for it, even when the teacher made me diagram:
“So,” I recall her saying after I had succeeded, “have you learned your lesson?”
“Yes, Mrs. Shaw. Can you give me another sentence to diagram?”
When I speak with others in my generation, most of them recall the diagramming of sentences with distaste. They tell me that it was of no value whatsoever and that they couldn’t diagram a sentence today if their lives depended on it.
I must be wired differently, or else I wouldn’t be writing this essay. Did sentence diagramming teach me anything? Absolutely. It taught me that English is, indeed, a language and not just the stuff that dribbles out of one’s mouth, or from pen to paper. That there’s both rhyme and reason to its structure. And it taught me to pay attention to every element of a sentence, and how to improve that sentence by jettisoning unnecessary words and retaining only the essential.
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In this light, I’d like to thank my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Shaw, who always meant well, even when she was imparting her benign discipline:
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