Why is diagramming considered so hard by some?

[Chris in VA]

An honest question, not just being snarky.

It seems so straightforward to me--put this here, that there, to get a picture of what goes with what. Is it the figuring out the part the word is playing in the sentence? We are just at the beginning of diagramming, but it seems so easy. I did a lot in jr hi--had grammar as a 12 week portion of English, I think--it's just so logical and all. How is it intimidating, esp the way Rod and Staff is so gentle in the introduction?

[gfam]

B/C it is insanely boring. ;) I have a hard time seeing the worth in even teaching sent. diagramming. ;)

[pooh bear]

I have a hard time understanding sentence diagramming, because in the UK we don't do that.

 

I did not pay much attention in English class, but I know that we did not diagram sentences. It's one of the weird things you Americans do. :D

 

I can see the benfit of it, so I am taking it very slowly with my son so that we can both learn it.

[SquirrellyMama]

An honest question, not just being snarky.

It seems so straightforward to me--put this here, that there, to get a picture of what goes with what. Is it the figuring out the part the word is playing in the sentence? We are just at the beginning of diagramming, but it seems so easy. I did a lot in jr hi--had grammar as a 12 week portion of English, I think--it's just so logical and all. How is it intimidating, esp the way Rod and Staff is so gentle in the introduction?

 

Are you a logical person in general? I think it can be intimidating for those of us who are more emotional, free spirit types.

 

I also didn't do it in school and don't really understand the point.

[Susie in CA]

B/C it is insanely boring. ;) I have a hard time seeing the worth in even teaching sent. diagramming. ;)

 

I think it is boring, too. However, my 4th grader loves (and I mean loves( diagramming.:lol:

 

Susie

Edited November 16, 2009 by Susie in CA

[Stacy in NJ]

An honest question, not just being snarky.

It seems so straightforward to me--put this here, that there, to get a picture of what goes with what. Is it the figuring out the part the word is playing in the sentence? We are just at the beginning of diagramming, but it seems so easy. I did a lot in jr hi--had grammar as a 12 week portion of English, I think--it's just so logical and all. How is it intimidating, esp the way Rod and Staff is so gentle in the introduction?

 

 

I don't find it difficult or boring now, after teaching and reviewing grammar for the past 5 years. It was at first because I graduated from high school never even having been exposed to many of the parts of speech (I had no idea what a prepositional phrase was 5 years ago), much less diagramming.

 

Diagramming is sorta like algebra. Much ta-do about nothing.:001_smile:

[Snickerdoodle]

When I was in jr. high and learning to diagram sentences, I breathed a sigh of relief because we had finally arrived at the logical portion of language arts.:tongue_smilie:

[elegantlion]

I don't have a hard time with it until you get into the advanced levels. I thought my ds would have a hard time with it, he doesn't. I realized that with him diagramming is just another pattern. He sees patterns in a lot of things, not just school. He called diagramming fun and asked to do more. :001_huh: This, from my writing phobic son. Of course I accommodated his wishes. He still thinks it's fun. :D

[gfam]

I never ever diagrammed a sentence in high school. Maybe that's why I struggle with doing it at all.

[Rhonda in TX]

A friend of mine was an English major in college and had a full semester class on diagramming. It was the class that was famous for ruining a 4.0 average. It was not an easy subject.

 

You could start this same type of discussion about a lot of different subjects. I get math. It makes sense to me. Literary analysis? I'm totally lost.

[Guest aquiverfull]

I also never did diagramming in public school. I find it hard, mostly because I was never taught how. This is our first encounter with it in homeschool, since we are using CLE LA this year. My daughter also finds it difficult and doesn't see the point of it. I make her do it anyway, I see how it can be beneficial.

[Chris in VA]

Are you a logical person in general?

 

Oh, heck no! I'm not the least bit logical! lol

I guess I just find it easy because there's a place for everything, and you just follow the rules to put the words on the lines, in order to see the structure of the language. Our grammar teacher taught us to throw out the pp phrases first, in order to find the subject/predicate. We learned each part of speech, and did simple diagramming before ramping it up a bit. I guess we never got all that advanced.

Thanks for answering.

[woolybear]

I think maybe it has something to do with how your brain works (right or left brained, visual, spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.). I don't know how this fits in. From my own experience I can tell you that I was always pretty good at writing and grammar in general. I'm not bragging; I just mean that it came easily to me. Even spelling I did pretty well at, but never remembered the rules. As to diagramming, I am clueless. I think we must've studied it at some point, but it feels almost like physics to me. Or....rocket science. :) I hear friends talking about teaching this to their kids and I just sit very quietly. That's still ahead of us anyway, but I am wondering now....Do I really have to??

 

Wooly

[Crimson Wife]

I found basic diagramming easy, but the advanced stuff can get pretty tricky. A friend in my local HS support group is pursuing a graduate-level certificate in editing and a few weeks ago she showed me a bunch of stuff from the grammar class she's taking. It was really hard- and I had gotten a 750 on the Writing SAT II (which at the time was mostly grammar, usage, & mechanics).

 

If you're just starting out, then you're only on the straightforward stuff.

[Haiku]

Is it the figuring out the part the word is playing in the sentence?

 

No. For me, the hard part in diagramming was figuring out where to put the word on the diagram. I can always tell you the function of a word in a sentence--that's easy. To me, the "picture" of the diagram never made sense. It always seems like it was made up of random lines. I am not a visual-spatial person.

 

Tara

[Nestof3]

No. For me, the hard part in diagramming was figuring out where to put the word on the diagram. I can always tell you the function of a word in a sentence--that's easy. To me, the "picture" of the diagram never made sense. It always seems like it was made up of random lines. I am not a visual-spatial person.

 

Tara

 

:iagree:

 

I've never had difficulty labeling parts of speech, but the lines do seem random. Use a vertical line here, an oblique line here. :tongue_smilie:

[sweetsouthern]

can u ladies tell me some grammar programs or curriculums that DONT have diagramming? around 3rd- 6th grade level please? thanks!

[PinkInTheBlue]

I have seen it to be a very powerful tool for my guys. They don't cheer and celebrate when it's time to diagram but I believe they see the power as well. It tremendously helps with identifying exactly where the words sit in a sentence and what they're roll is. It's been wonderful for our grammar education.

[Matryoshka]

can u ladies tell me some grammar programs or curriculums that DONT have diagramming? around 3rd- 6th grade level please? thanks!

 

Easy Grammar and Michael Clay Thompson.

 

I'm a huge grammar weenie - love grammar!- but I never learned diagramming and don't plan on starting now! :tongue_smilie:

[Rosie_0801]

I had trouble with the bit I did at uni because it required a scientific mind set while every other class was training me in humanities.

 

Rosie- not sure that made sense.

[Snickerdoodle]

can u ladies tell me some grammar programs or curriculums that DONT have diagramming? around 3rd- 6th grade level please? thanks!

 

Easy Grammar

 

 

 

Thank you for posting this information and saving me a bit of trouble.

[Sue G in PA]

Just had to share a funny story related to sentence diagramming. Dd12 is in 8th grade in ps this year. She has had diagramming since 6th grade using Rod and Staff and then LLATL...she's good at it and enjoys it now. Well, schools around here don't do much with grammar much less diagramming. So, when here English teacher announced they would be learning to diagram sentences, my dd's face lit up! After an entire class on it, the whole class complained that it was too hard! They were only doing subjects and verbs and perhaps a direct object AND the teacher had the diagrams already drawn so all they had to do was fill in the blanks! Well, the teacher had made a mistake on one of the diagrams and dd caught it and corrected her, explaining why it was wrong. :lol: Good thing the teacher likes my dd! Anyway, my dh took a class on diagramming after college and LOVED it! Me? I just roll my eyes. I can take it or leave it.

[Annie Laurie]

I have not read through the responses. But wanted to say that your thread caught my eye because my ds15 understands grammar better because of diagramming. He is highly visual and is a whiz at diagramming. When he labels a sentence incorrectly in Analytical Grammar, he can instantly see his mistake when he diagrams it. I've found it interesting how much diagramming has made things click for him because he struggled with other LA components like spelling and yet he's very good at grammar.

[Ritsumei]

OK, so I see that several people have said they can see the value of it. Could you explain, please? All the exposure to diagraming I have came from when my high school ran out of English classes for me (it was a very rural school and I was a transplant, so I messed up their 4 year - 4 classes system), and I took a "creative writing" class where I ended up spending most of my time trying to diagram. I guess it was the hard stuff, cuz it gave me fits. I took my stuff to the Senior English teacher and said, "Help me." Because he was supposed to be supervising my correspondence class. He said, "I don't know how." So I muddled through it the best I could. That was NOT a "living book" I was working with, LOL! I didn't do too badly, though I don't remember much, and I never did see the conection between creative writing and diagraming, so if someone here does, I'd appreciate it. I've never worked so hard on grammer in all my life as I did on that crazy diagraming stuff!

[plain jane]

can u ladies tell me some grammar programs or curriculums that DONT have diagramming? around 3rd- 6th grade level please? thanks!

 

Shurley English (some people call it Shurley Grammar) is another.

[Dinsfamily]

I'm another one who will probably find it hard at first when I start teaching it. I didn't diagram sentences in school. In fact, we weren't even taught formal grammar that I can remember except 1 lesson on conjunctions in 5th grade. I've picked up a lot of grammar over the years from college and grad school, but I'm still learning a lot from the Ruth Heller series.

 

I'm planning on getting a book on diagramming soon so that I'll be up to speed by the time I start teaching it. I'm a mathy/logical person so it'll be a fun concept for me. Ds1 is the same so I know he'll want to learn grammar this way. I expect he'll love diagramming as much as he loves marking words.

[ekarl2]

OK, so I see that several people have said they can see the value of it. Could you explain, please? All the exposure to diagraming I have came from when my high school ran out of English classes for me (it was a very rural school and I was a transplant, so I messed up their 4 year - 4 classes system), and I took a "creative writing" class where I ended up spending most of my time trying to diagram. I guess it was the hard stuff, cuz it gave me fits. I took my stuff to the Senior English teacher and said, "Help me." Because he was supposed to be supervising my correspondence class. He said, "I don't know how." So I muddled through it the best I could. That was NOT a "living book" I was working with, LOL! I didn't do too badly, though I don't remember much, and I never did see the conection between creative writing and diagraming, so if someone here does, I'd appreciate it. I've never worked so hard on grammer in all my life as I did on that crazy diagraming stuff!

 

There is no connection between grammar and being a good creative writer. There is, however, a DIRECT connection between grammar and not riddling your writing with punctuation and usage errors to the point where no one will pay attention to the lovely story you've written.

If there were a way to get a student to MASTER punctuation and usage rules without a mastery of grammar, I wouldn't teach grammar at all. But you can't. How would you explain that a comma goes after an introductory adverb clause or around non-essential participial phrases if the child doesn't know what those are? Many try to get by and say that you pause, so you comma. That will work about 80% of the time ... it's the other 20% that make you look silly.

It's those clauses and phrases (gerunds, infinitives, noun clauses, etc.) that are the important part. Just knowing your parts of speech gets you NOTHING. I find it next to impossible to get a kid to really master that advanced grammar without drawing a picture of the sentence. It's just too complex. Without a diagram you find yourself saying things like:

 

You need to use "whom" there because it's the direct object of that gerund phrase. The gerund phrase is acting as the subject of the sentence, though.

 

Eyes glaze over ...

 

Draw a picture of that sentence to a kids that understands a diagram and it's no big deal.

[Tress]

Erin,

 

Thank you for this explanation! I'm in the Netherlands and haven't found anyone who even knows what diagramming is :D, so I just assumed that teaching my kids to parse a sentence was enough.

 

Duh, now I have to figure out a way to learn diagraming before I need it with my kids.:tongue_smilie:I guess I need to order R&S (or something else?) for myself.

[Ritsumei]

OK, thank you Erin. That makes sense. Tress, what's "parsing?"

[Momling]

I think, especially if you're working in multiple languages, that it makes more sense to teach your children how to do a very simple syntax tree like linguists do than to teach how to diagram English sentences. I think syntax trees are much more intuitive and show relationships between words and phrases and can be applied to other languages. Plus, they can show movement (like why we use 'do' or how questions are formed) and explain/predict ungrammatical sentences. I'd consider picking up an introduction to linguistics type of book and taking a look at the syntax section...

 

A simple tree would look like this (where S=sentence, NP=Noun Phrase, D=determiner, VP=Verb phrase, V=Verb)

 

[Georgia On My Mind]

I taught school in grades 5-12 for 25 years and then became an educational therapist. I did teach diagramming in elem/ms and had students who loved it and students who hated it and never got it. After becoming an educational therapist, I began to see how diagramming could help the visual learners see how different parts of the sentences worked together and related to each other. It was an orderly way to analyze a sentence. I can see the frustration it causes for some students who are auditory learners. I recommend the Shurley Grammar jingle method with question and answer flow for the auditory learners. In my experience as an educator using various curriculae over the years, Shurley Grammar reaches more students than any other popular Christian curricula I used. Our county did not teach formal grammar/whole language and we often had students transfer in to our Christian school. Shurley Grammar remediated and brought them up to speed with the rest of the class within the first 9 weeks of school. (in the miraculous range in a teacher's eyes)

 

The logic of diagramming is great for the logical thinker because there is a place for everything and when the "pattern" is learned it is easy to add complex sentence elements. The brain loves pattern in any form, math or LA.

 

Good luck finding the key for your student.

[ekarl2]

Erin,

 

Thank you for this explanation! I'm in the Netherlands and haven't found anyone who even knows what diagramming is :D, so I just assumed that teaching my kids to parse a sentence was enough.

 

Duh, now I have to figure out a way to learn diagraming before I need it with my kids.:tongue_smilie:I guess I need to order R&S (or something else?) for myself.

My pleasure! If you have the right curriculum, you can learn the diagraming right along with them. I sell a curriculum my mom wrote. I don't want to be seen as advertising on here, but PM me if you want info. :tongue_smilie:

 

Ritsumei - parsing is an old-fashioned word that means to label the parts of speech. Most grammar programs have the kids write an abbr. for the part of speech above the word in a sentence. The only problem with just doing that is that just IDing the part of speech doesn't tell you what JOB those words are doing. That word may be a noun, but is it the subject or the object of a preposition. That's the important stuff.

[ondreeuh]

A friend of mine was an English major in college and had a full semester class on diagramming. It was the class that was famous for ruining a 4.0 average. It was not an easy subject.

 

You could start this same type of discussion about a lot of different subjects. I get math. It makes sense to me. Literary analysis? I'm totally lost.

 

This made me LOL because a friend and I were taking summer credits and I suggested taking grammar (which neither of us needed; I thought it would be useful and easy).

 

I think I got a C (which did significantly impact my GPA), and my poor friend had to RE-TAKE the class later to erase the F she got!

 

I do remember arguing with the teacher about genitives .... she said "six feet of hose" was a genitive (the hose's six feet) and I disagreed. I hope I was right but honestly don't remember.

Edited November 17, 2009 by ondreeuh

[GESTEP]

I taught school in grades 5-12 for 25 years and then became an educational therapist. I did teach diagramming in elem/ms and had students who loved it and students who hated it and never got it. After becoming an educational therapist, I began to see how diagramming could help the visual learners see how different parts of the sentences worked together and related to each other. It was an orderly way to analyze a sentence. I can see the frustration it causes for some students who are auditory learners. I recommend the Shurley Grammar jingle method with question and answer flow for the auditory learners.

The logic of diagramming is great for the logical thinker because there is a place for everything and when the "pattern" is learned it is easy to add complex sentence elements. The brain loves pattern in any form, math or LA.

 

Good luck finding the key for your student.

 

Thanks for posting this. I just started R&S 3 with our very auditory learner and she is quite frustrated and not understanding diagramming at all. She can identify the parts of speech but those lines mean nothing to her. I am very visual and loved diagramming in school. It made so much sense to me and it was fun to put everything in a neat little place.

I wonder if doing sentence diagramming will help strenghten that way of thinking or if it is a case of there is no way to think "visually" for her since she is not wired that way? From your experience it sounds as if it this will never make sense to her. I am not ready to ditch it yet since we have only been working on it for a few weeks so I do want to give it a fair try. Any thoughts on this anyone??? thanks!

 

Gina

[buddhabelly]

someone would provide my answer, and phrase it better than I could. So, thanks, Erin! I like diagramming because it eliminates the "sort of" answers from your children. An adjective is sort of, um...... No. This is the adjective, because it modifies the noun. This phrase is an adverbial phrase because it modifies "went" which is a verb. The diagram clearly shows this. Parsing is fine for simple sentences -- really, it is. But how the heck are you going to parse a compound sentence that opens with a prepositional phrase and then has two subjects but one predicate? Yes, you will be able to label the nouns and perhaps the DO's, but not whether the DO is part of an adverbial phrase, an adjectival phrase, or perhaps just a regular ol' DO.

 

I didn't learn diagramming in school. I was raised in the 1960's, so I learned whatever I wanted to. :glare: Which, unfortunately, was not a whole lot.

 

Julie

[Dinsfamily]

I taught school in grades 5-12 for 25 years and then became an educational therapist. I did teach diagramming in elem/ms and had students who loved it and students who hated it and never got it. After becoming an educational therapist, I began to see how diagramming could help the visual learners see how different parts of the sentences worked together and related to each other. It was an orderly way to analyze a sentence. I can see the frustration it causes for some students who are auditory learners. I recommend the Shurley Grammar jingle method with question and answer flow for the auditory learners. In my experience as an educator using various curriculae over the years, Shurley Grammar reaches more students than any other popular Christian curricula I used. Our county did not teach formal grammar/whole language and we often had students transfer in to our Christian school. Shurley Grammar remediated and brought them up to speed with the rest of the class within the first 9 weeks of school. (in the miraculous range in a teacher's eyes)

 

The logic of diagramming is great for the logical thinker because there is a place for everything and when the "pattern" is learned it is easy to add complex sentence elements. The brain loves pattern in any form, math or LA.

 

Good luck finding the key for your student.

 

Thank you so much for this! My oldest is a visual-logical learner like me so it is easy to know what curricula will work for him. However, my middle boy is definitely an auditory learner. I don't know yet if he's logically minded, but he does lean toward the creative. This is a great reminder that I might not be able to use the same approach with both of them. I'll have to file this away for later.

[Tress]

parsing is an old-fashioned word that means to label the parts of speech. Most grammar programs have the kids write an abbr. for the part of speech above the word in a sentence. The only problem with just doing that is that just IDing the part of speech doesn't tell you what JOB those words are doing. That word may be a noun, but is it the subject or the object of a preposition. That's the important stuff.

 

In the Netherlands we are taught (that is IF your school teaches it, most don't) to parse sentences in two ways. You look at a sentence and write under the word if it is a noun or adjective or reflexive pronoun etc, and you label the words with the subject or object or indirect object etc.

 

What I got from Erin's explanation was that when you get to the really complex sentences, it becomes very hard to talk about it but drawing a diagram will make it much clearer and not only for the students who are highly visual but for all students. Right, Erin?

 

I think, especially if you're working in multiple languages, that it makes more sense to teach your children how to do a very simple syntax tree like linguists do than to teach how to diagram English sentences.

 

Momling, I once asked my sister (who has a masters degree in both Spanish and...I don't know the English word for it....I think you would call it 'applied linguistics') about diagraming, showing her some American examples. She had never seen it. She did tell me about these syntax trees, however she thought I was crazy for wanting to learn that and completely crazy for wanting to teach my kids that :001_huh:.

 

After Erin's post I was thinking of learning myself to diagram with an English course and then to teach that to my kids in Dutch, as I think that diagramming in a foreign language may be too much for young children.

 

Now I'm confused!:001_huh:

 

Last night I was ready to order R&S, however the 70% shipping held me back :lol:.

 

Do you (general you) think it is even possible to be able to talk about language in the way Erin and Buddhabelly (post #35) do, simply by learning to diagram? Arrrgh, there is so much to learn :tongue_smilie:.

[ekarl2]

In the Netherlands we are taught (that is IF your school teaches it, most don't) to parse sentences in two ways. You look at a sentence and write under the word if it is a noun or adjective or reflexive pronoun etc, and you label the words with the subject or object or indirect object etc.

 

What I got from Erin's explanation was that when you get to the really complex sentences, it becomes very hard to talk about it but drawing a diagram will make it much clearer and not only for the students who are highly visual but for all students. Right, Erin?

 

*****That's right! To address the auditory learners ... all you need to do is add an auditory component to it. have them talk about what they're doing and why as they do the diagram. *****

 

 

 

Momling, I once asked my sister (who has a masters degree in both Spanish and...I don't know the English word for it....I think you would call it 'applied linguistics') about diagraming, showing her some American examples. She had never seen it. She did tell me about these syntax trees, however she thought I was crazy for wanting to learn that and completely crazy for wanting to teach my kids that :001_huh:.

 

After Erin's post I was thinking of learning myself to diagram with an English course and then to teach that to my kids in Dutch, as I think that diagramming in a foreign language may be too much for young children.

 

Now I'm confused!:001_huh:

 

Last night I was ready to order R&S, however the 70% shipping held me back :lol:.

 

Do you (general you) think it is even possible to be able to talk about language in the way Erin and Buddhabelly (post #35) do, simply by learning to diagram? Arrrgh, there is so much to learn :tongue_smilie:.

 

Learning diagraming allows you to learn to talk about language that way. The problem is that I have no idea how your native language "works." If you plan on teaching your children to be fluent in English, then I would wait until their written and spoken English is at about a 4th grade level, then teach them the English grammar using diagraming as a teaching tool so they can master the advanced stuff. This will allow them to master the usage and punctuation.

 

PS I put another answer in the quote ... look for the stars ...

[Julie in MN]

I didn't learn diagramming in school. I was raised in the 1960's, so I learned whatever I wanted to. :glare: Which, unfortunately, was not a whole lot.

 

Julie

 

I'm another julie who learned precious little in the 60s...

 

Anyways, I don't diagram and still am able to figure out problems in a sentence. I'm liking that MCT presents a diagram regularly so it's not completely foreign, but I much prefer his writing 4 levels of analysis under the sentences & keeping the sentences in their original order, rather than creating some dangly foreign object that doesn't look much like a sentence to me :)

 

JMHO!

Julie

[Matryoshka]

Anyways, I don't diagram and still am able to figure out problems in a sentence. I'm liking that MCT presents a diagram regularly so it's not completely foreign, but I much prefer his writing 4 levels of analysis under the sentences & keeping the sentences in their original order, rather than creating some dangly foreign object that doesn't look much like a sentence to me :)

 

 

:iagree: I don't have any trouble finding out what things are doing in a sentence without diagramming, but that may be partly the way my brain works, or it may be speaking two other languages where knowing what things are doing is imperative (or you can't conjugate verbs or inflect adjectives correctly) - after that figuring out my native tongue seems like a cakewalk. I also love MCT's way of analysis.

[Julie in MN]

or it may be speaking two other languages where knowing what things are doing is imperative (or you can't conjugate verbs or inflect adjectives correctly) -

 

Is there a smiley for being in awe of someone???

[Momling]

 

 

Momling, I once asked my sister (who has a masters degree in both Spanish and...I don't know the English word for it....I think you would call it 'applied linguistics') about diagraming, showing her some American examples. She had never seen it. She did tell me about these syntax trees, however she thought I was crazy for wanting to learn that and completely crazy for wanting to teach my kids that :001_huh:.

 

 

 

The key to learning about syntax is knowing when to stop... The goal of syntacticians since Chomsky in the 1960's has been to figure out a framework of grammar in which all grammars of all languages can be predicted... but that's not what you need! And you certainly don't need the details of the minimalist program or lexical-functional grammar or any of that.

You just need the kind of basic generative syntax that you'd learn in the first two days of a freshman intro linguistics class. You only need to help your child understand the idea of parts of speech and phrases and how they fit together. You can do it in Dutch and then in English and then in Latin or whatever languages your kids might be working on. Diagramming sentences would work too, but I think syntax trees are more modern and useful. And learning a bit of real linguistics may make them one day want to become linguists!

[gardening momma]

Ritsumei - parsing is an old-fashioned word that means to label the parts of speech. Most grammar programs have the kids write an abbr. for the part of speech above the word in a sentence. The only problem with just doing that is that just IDing the part of speech doesn't tell you what JOB those words are doing. That word may be a noun, but is it the subject or the object of a preposition. That's the important stuff.

 

In the Netherlands we are taught (that is IF your school teaches it, most don't) to parse sentences in two ways. You look at a sentence and write under the word if it is a noun or adjective or reflexive pronoun etc, and you label the words with the subject or object or indirect object etc.

When we labeled sentences in jr. high and high school, we did something similar to what Tress said. I remember underlining, labeling above, and drawing arrows from one word to another. We didn't just label the parts of speech. We also learned diagramming. I liked both methods.

[Julie in MN]

I think syntax trees are more modern and useful.

 

So what's a syntax tree? I suppose I can google it...

[Jim]

I remember there was an attempt to teach me how to diagram a sentence. The attempt was a failure and I remember it like it was yesterday.

 

Now that we've decided to teach our son I'm chomping at the bit to get to diagramming. I'm sure I'll get it this time and I want to know what I didn't understand all those years ago. Why couldn't I put it together?

 

Of course, I need to learn all those pesky parts of speech first. We've just started FLL2 and I have FLL3 on the corner of my desk. I can't wait to get started!

 

And to think, I'm a writer by trade. I have good editors and I feel bad every time I submit my work. I should know this stuff!

 

My son will know grammer and how to put a thought on paper in a logical and sometimes entertaining manner. He will.

[Sunkirst]

I'm learning diagramming right now with my son (using AG). What I'm having the toughest time with is where to put the prepositional phrases. I'm having the darndest time with this. Not intuitive at all!

[ekarl2]

I'm learning diagramming right now with my son (using AG). What I'm having the toughest time with is where to put the prepositional phrases. I'm having the darndest time with this. Not intuitive at all!

 

Go to the FAQ of our Web site and scroll down to the questions for current users. There is help there. If you're still confused at all, please call me; I'm happy to help! The phone number is on the inside cover of your book.

[kalanamak]

I think maybe it has something to do with how your brain works (right or left brained, visual, spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.). I don't know how this fits in. From my own experience I can tell you that I was always pretty good at writing and grammar in general. I'm not bragging; I just mean that it came easily to me. Even spelling I did pretty well at, but never remembered the rules. As to diagramming, I am clueless.

 

If you liked The Elements of Style, there is a diagramming book that is written in a similar style. It is so readable, and with a little twist here and there, I have enjoyed it very much:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Rex-Barks-Diagramming-Sentences-Made/dp/1889439355

[Momling]

So what's a syntax tree? I suppose I can google it...

 

I think an enjoyable, accessible introduction for a non-linguist would be something like "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker (ch. 4 particularly) because it's an interesting and useful read regardless of whether you explicitly teach syntax or not. Otherwise, check out a beginning linguistics textbook in a library. It's a topic that can get heavy quick, so be forewarned!