Sentence diagramming is the long division of English. It involves a bewildering array of lines and diagonal branches. It is loathed as an elementary school chore. And it is presumed to be obsolete.

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.

I have a new hero in the world of education. His name is Thomas Lott and he teaches at Nativity Preparatory Academy on Gregory Street. I toured the small Catholic school for grades 5-7 this morning, ...

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 ...

*Refers to the latest 2 years of stltoday.com stories. Cancel anytime. According to the letter by Carl W. Lehne of Florissant, "Meaning gets lost in cartoon about sentence diagramming" (Jan. 29), the ...

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 ...

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: ...

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 ...