From A Practical Grammar by S.W. Clark
Bored at a wedding reception, I started chatting with an old friend of my husband’s. Somehow one of us mentioned loving, back in grade school, diagramming sentences. Soon we were scribbling complicated challenges on cocktail napkins, oblivious to the tipsy fun that swirled around us. How nerdy can you get? Still, we were in good company. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” announced the formidable Gertrude Stein, though her own sentences would defy the art.
Why is the game such fun? It feels like codebreaking. Or like surgery, peeling back layers of skin and fat to reveal hard pale bones. I am lousy at creating structure—it always seems so mean, cutting away delightful excesses and digressions and forcing your material into a predetermined form, like a tortured little bonsai tree. But I love revealing structure.
Diagramming puts everything in its place, rearranges the jumble, orders it. You have to at least know, if not fully understand, the various parts of your speech and the roles they play in your sentence. A simple little tree with straight and slanted branches—what a lovely thing to make of a string of words.
Kids no longer learn to diagram sentences, unless they have very smart teachers who ignore the teach-to-the-test constraints and the mandate to be friendly and fun at all costs. I read that the art was abandoned because there was no evidence that it improved writing. I also read that this conclusion was mainly anecdotal, because diagramming had never been subjected to rigorous large-scale studies.
I comprehended what I read because I remember to focus on subjects and verbs first, and to see clauses as a unit with a single job, and to heed their modifiers’ limits.
True, there are many ways to skin cats and avoid clichés. Diagramming was never to every kid’s taste. But diagramming forces you to see the logical connections between different parts of the sentence. It makes syntax visible. It requires analysis of the sentence’s construction and meaning. As editor of a city magazine, I saw plenty of freelanced sentences that lacked a subject or a verb or failed to close themselves neatly. Wicked, it would have been, to tuck a wee diagram into the margin.
Ah, but diagrams are passé. They take too long, kids having to draw all those lines and take all those sentences apart and ponder them. Because I am lazy too, I ask the Perplexity AI to scour the internet and tell me why nobody diagrams anymore. “Critics argue that while diagramming may improve understanding of sentence structure, it doesn’t necessarily translate to better writing skills.” Excuse me? Is it not advisable to understand sentence structure before you write? And even if a kid loathes writing and fumbles their way through it, do we not want them to understand the structure of the sentences they read? They may be president someday. Right now, we have an incumbent, a vice president, and a past-president candidate all speaking in word salads. The lack of internal logic and clarity this suggests makes me nervous.
But that is mean, and we are meant to be kind. Especially in the classroom. “Some students may find diagraming tedious,” Perplexity explains. God forbid they learn patience. No need for it, after all. They have instantaneous grammar-checking technology, another reason cited for diagramming’s demise. The new philosophy is that language arts (can we still call them arts?) must be taught in practical, interactive ways, emphasizing communication rather than structure.
But structure is the foundation of communication.
I think I would rather hang out with James Brown. Well, him too, but I mean the one who wrote American Grammar, published in 1831. “Language is an emanation from God,” he insisted. “As a gift, it claims our servitude; as a science, it demands our highest attention.” Accordingly, Brown came up with a fancy way to diagram sentence parts using round and square brackets. He called what he advocated “close reading,” something we seem to have lost the knack of.
I read about Brown in Public Domain Review’s fine history of diagramming, which moves on to Oliver B. Peirce and his wish to build a “temple of Grammatical consistency.” His diagrams were chain-link, fencing in the meaning. “If one link grammatically falters, the whole chain of meaning becomes undone.”
From A Practical Grammar by S.W. Clark
Solomon Barrett was one of the first to use a tree, showing us branching connections and etymological roots. He even added bark. More arboreal innovations followed. The closest anyone came in the nineteenth century to today’s fast-fading diagrams was the word balloons strung by Stephen Watkins Clark in A Practical Grammar (see above). A century later, in Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey describes those shapes as “elaborate systems of propane storage tanks—or possibly invading hordes of Goodyear blimps.” Public Domain Review calls them “twisted balloon animals”—and they were later popped, giving us the flatlined Reed-Kellog system I learned.
Diagramming was, incidentally, a purely American invention. Grammarians of the New World adored it, Europeans envied it, and nuns took to it with zeal—diagrams were nearly as satisfying as medieval proofs of God. In public schools, the art thrived through the 1950s. Then the 1960 Encyclopedia of Educational Research threw shade: “Diagramming sentences … teaches nothing beyond the ability to diagram.” By 1985, educational theorists were fretting that diagramming was too much like drilling and only frustrated many students.
If we diagram the diagram’s trajectory, we can see its sad conclusions clearly.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
