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



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