The question is whether diagramming helps, whether students understand the functions of the various parts of sentences better with diagrams. Does it help to put flag and Camping on a line where the system says subjects belong? Students could analyze the sentences and come to the same conclusion without a diagram. What a diagram does illustrate is that Camping, normally a verb, is used as a subject. But students can also understand that without a diagram. They’ve used those kinds of nominatives for years. For visual learners, the diagram may help. Diagrams appear neat and attractive for some, frown formidably for others. Several problems with diagramming: (1) On some level the lines and sticks appear to make clear the relationship of the parts, but diagrams do almost nothing to explain meaning, while they oversimplify language structures. (2) Diagrams in textbooks use someone else’s sentences. Few difficult ones. None that cannot be parsed neatly. (3) Diagrams are not predictive; that is, they don’t help students produce sentences of their own. (4) Diagrams fail to distinguish between form and function; that is, any word or phrase in subject position must be a nominative. Many different kinds of structures can be nominatives: gerunds, infinitives, prepositional phrases, noun clauses. (5) Badly worded and ungrammatical sentences can be diagrammed as neatly as well-worded sentences can. (6) Diagramming as an exercise can become an end in itself. (7) Sentences are isolated from context, never the case in actual use. (8) Diagrams fail to make a connection between knowing how to do them and being able to speak and write more effectively. Diagrams don’t automatically help students improve their style. They may even prevent students from exploring their own linguistic creativity.

In Teacher Man Frank McCourt explains his inability to teach diagramming, the “structure and Euclidian beauty of it.” He admits, “I tried but failed. I made lines vertical, horizontal, slanting, and then I stood, adrift at the blackboard, till a Chinese student volunteered to take over and teach the teacher what the teacher should have known.”

In her recent book Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog Kitty Burns Florey concludes that diagramming, while a joyful activity for some students, will not improve their writing or speaking. “Few people would deny that students need to master grammar in order to write decently,” Florey writes. “But there are other places to acquire it than in sixth-grade grammar classes. . . . The fact is that a lot of people don’t need diagramming or anything else: they pick up grammar and syntax effortlessly through their reading . . . and they do things correctly without knowing why.”

Grammar Today 84 Chapter 6. The Beginnings of Traditional Grammar    Dick Betting