Mary noted that she will be developing her own additional materials for sentence diagramming. I hope those of you who do use diagramming eventually have students select the sentences to be diagrammed, sentences from their own writing (or reading). I devote about three weeks to sentence structure in my college Freshman comp classes. My approach is somewhat different from traditional diagramming. I have students begin by learning to identify prepositional phrases in entire paragraphs. Then we add subject/verb/complement patterns. Then we add clauses (subordinate and main). This leads to the students' evaluating a passage of their own writing, which they then evaluate statistically for such things as words and subordinate clauses per main clause. As we discuss the implications of these statistics, students are often frustrated that they were not taught this stuff in high school. (They could have been; I would even say should have been.) Among other things, we discuss "norms": the average professional uses 20 words per main clause. (Rough norms for school students are in the research of Kellogg Hunt, Roy O'Donnell, and Walter Loban, and I have been slowly working to futher validate and supplement their work.) When a student who is writing nine words per main clause sees that the class average is 15 and that some classmates are writing 19 or more, the student begins to understand that his/her writing sounds "different." Many students want me to spend more time on syntax in the course, but I can't do so in Freshman comp. Naturally I prefer my approach rather than sentence-diagramming, but next to my approach, diagramming is the best thing students can do.