Susan,

I would like to give you my angle on sentence diagraming.  I certainly
don't mean to impugn your understanding of English, but I'm not sure that
your characterization of sentence diagraming does full justice to that
(frequently maligned) subdiscipline.  I think of grammar as the study of
the relationships among words in a sentence.  When I refer to sentence
diagraming I am thinking of the style of diagram introduced (I believe) by
Reed and Kellogg, where the simple subject and the main verb are placed on
a horizontal line separated by a vertical etc.  I'm open to other methods,
provided they convey the same information.

The Reed and Kellogg diagrams unambiguously symbolize almost all the
relationships found among words in English sentences.  There are
exceptional usages that create difficulties, but this is true of any
system of classification.

It seems to me that the criticisms usually raised against diagraming are
applicable to any system of symbolization.  You can in some sense
understand things in themselves without knowing how to represent them
according to a particular system of symbolization.   (I have to admit
that you were right to call me on the exaggerated claim that if you can't
diagram a sentence, you don't understand its structure.  In saying
that, I was taking for granted an understanding of the rules of
diagraming.) There is a sense in which people know words that they cannot
spell or tunes for which they could not write the musical notes.
Nevertheless, systems of symbolization have huge advantages.  They enable
you to photograph your understanding, examine it, compare it to others'
etc. For these reasons, I don't see how the study of grammar can get along
without diagraming or an equivalent system of symbolizaiton.




On Tue, 27 Jun 2000, Susan Witt wrote:

> At 6/27/00, you wrote:
> >Three cheers!  I feel exactly the same way.  If you can diagram the sentence,
> >you understand its structure.  If you can't, you don't.
>
> I disagree.  Diagramming a sentence means that you have to understand not
> only what an adjective is, but where in the diagram it belongs.  Looking at
> sentence diagrams to me is like looking at Arabic writing -- it really
> doesn't make sense to me, even though I understand the words.  Maybe that's
> because no one has ever tried to explain it to me.
>
> I can't believe that this means I don't understand sentence structure.  I
> may not know the words that categorize things, but I do know how the words
> relate to each other and how they should go together.  I can read what I
> call "3 paragraph sentences" and know whether they are written in correct
> English and what they are talking about.  (Put Persian and English
> complexities together in a sentence, as a writer named Shoghi Effendi does,
> and you come up with some whopper sentences!)
>
> Moreover, I can understand sentences well enough to help my students make
> sense of them and understand why one way of saying things is appropriate
> formal English and another is not.  While I do use a simple, modified form
> of diagramming, I have never used the formal diagramming in English texts
> to do this.
>
> I am quite sure that this technique is very helpful for some students, but
> seriously doubt that it is the most important thing or the most useful
> thing for all students.
>
>
> Susan Mari Witt
>
>
>
> 240 ERML, MC-051
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