After reading The Times article about diagramming sentences, I had to wonder how many of my fellow classmates had diagrammed sentences as a part of their grammar and language learning in middle and high school. Probably not many. However, I went to a small, private Christian school that did not have money for computers in the classroom or new digital methods. Thus, I wrote essays by hand, and I took notes by hand, and I learned by hand. It has been interesting to me to see how my collegiate peers can type faster than they can write, while I am exactly the opposite. One of the things I am so glad that I learned from my time at Grove school was diagramming sentences. I absolutely LOVED it. I was the whiz kid in grammar because there was not a sentence I could not break down into the bits and pieces and make it a piece of art.
The author of the article asks what the benefits are of diagramming sentences. Well, let me tell you. If you grow up diagramming sentences, you understand the parts of the sentence within the whole, and the difference between a dependent clause and an independent one by visualizing it in your head. For example, the sentence - I really liked learning a new language - is broken down into:
I / liked / learning
\really \a language
\new
In this way, when a student is asked whether "learning a language" is an independent or dependent clause, it is easy to see that it lacks a subject, thus it is dependent. The whole structure would be different if it were independent.
How does this benefit students? I love learning languages, and I have found my knowledge of diagramming invaluable. When I began learning Spanish, it helped me with adjective placement after the noun instead of before it. When I learned French, it helped me with the odd "Qui, que, dont" prepositions which all mean different forms of "that." Qui is always diagrammed as the subject, que as the direct object, and dont as an object of preposition. Learning Kannada, when the verb has to come at the end of the entire sentence, it has helped me rethink the phrases in the context of how a native speaker would diagram the sentence. Thus, I would hope that future generations would learn diagramming; its not yet a dead language.
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