"Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills," writes Kitty Burns Florey,
like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. Invented, or at least codified, in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like a measles germ, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “it’s me” and “I ain’t got none,” until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.
Are her critical senses influenced by Mark Twain? One might think so, given that last bit about Cooper. But that's not my point here.
What is my point is that "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog" is an utterly charming essay on the pleasures of diagramming sentences, one I have only recently discovered for myself. Oh, I've been exposed to the technique, all right, but unlike Ms. Florey I have no fond memories of diagramming: I hated it as a kid. It never really gelled for me, partly because I was ambitious to get on with the truly serious business of life, that is, becoming another Keith Richards or John Lennon. But it was also because at the time it never made sense to me: making a diagram out of a sentence seemed pointless in itself, and was made difficult by the fact that knowing where to fit a direct object is not such a simple matter if you haven't been taught the difference between subject and object in the first place.
But grammar is crucial to communication, and I wish a mastery of the technical aspects of the English language -- and I find that diagramming helps. The formal model of diagramming is a memory aid, because it is visual, and it is also an analytical aid, because of the decisions required as a sentence is diagrammed. And it's not 1973 any more: these days, I think it's fun to diagram a sentence.
Today, diagramming is not exactly dead, but for many years it has been on a steep slide into marginality. This is probably partly because diagramming sentences doubles the task of the student, who has to learn a whole new set of rules – where does that pesky line go, and which way does it slant? – in order to illustrate a set of rules that, in fact, has already been learned pretty thoroughly simply by immersion in the language from birth. It’s only the subtleties that are difficult – who vs. whom, adjective vs. adverb, it’s I vs. it’s me – and most of those come from the mostly doomed attempt, so beloved in the early days of English grammar, to stuff the unruliness of English into the well-made boxes of Latin and Greek, which is something like forcing a struggling cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE 10 Oct 2004: A wonderful book on how to diagram sentences is Phyllis Davenport's Rex Barks, available from The Paper Tiger. As an example of how clever and memorable some of Davenport's rules can be, consider how she explains prepositions: a presposition, she informs us, is anything a squirrel can do to a tree. Think on that one!
Posted by Craig Ceely at October 8, 2004 11:58 AM