My life sentence? Diagramming.

At the university where I teach, an edict recently went out in another department – which shall go nameless to protect the guilty – that teachers were no longer to correct students’ grammar. I was, in a word, aghast. Of course, I was molded in a different environment – a parochial elementary school at the acme of the baby boom. (There were 60 children in my first grade class and one solitary, long-suffering teacher.)In that strict environment, if anyone had dared to suggest that grammar didn’t matter, it would have been a capital offense. As such, it was drilled, drilled, drilled into us that grammar was the foundation on which clear, accurate, educated expression was built.It was in fourth grade that things got serious. One day, the teacher walked to the board and began to teach us how to diagram sentences. Yes, diagram sentences, a practice that is almost unheard of today. But even at the tender age of 10, I was fascinated by the idea that a sentence could be illustrated. As someone who liked to draw, I was all in. The concept is straightforward and mechanical. Basically, you separate out the different parts of speech (do people still know what “parts of speech” means?) – subject, verb, articles, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc. Now, the fun begins. You draw a horizontal line, and then a short vertical line dividing that first line. On the left goes the subject, and on the right the verb. Then, branching off from the horizontal line, as many diagonal lines as are necessary for the articles, modifiers, and direct and indirect objects. Phew! Didn’t I say it was fun? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes.Example sentence: Horses in the lovely pasture graze after sunset.The diagram:You can imagine how complicated things get when it comes to more sophisticated sentences. The diagram becomes a daunting network of lines and words, looking something like the transit map of a large city. And yet the principle is the same, as illustrated by my humble example above. Now, the plot thickens. By fifth grade, diagramming sentences had graduated to a form of discipline in my school. If one was a bad boy or girl, they were sent posthaste to the board, upon which the teacher, Mrs. Shaw, had written a sentence to be diagrammed. There was no relief from the shame until one had succeeded. The thing is, I enjoyed the exercise so much that, for me, it was not so much a punishment as an invigorating challenge. I seemed to have a knack for it, even when the teacher made me diagram:“So,” I recall her saying after I had succeeded, “have you learned your lesson?”“Yes, Mrs. Shaw. Can you give me another sentence to diagram?”When I speak with others in my generation, most of them recall the diagramming of sentences with distaste. They tell me that it was of no value whatsoever and that they couldn’t diagram a sentence today if their lives depended on it.I must be wired differently, or else I wouldn’t be writing this essay. Did sentence diagramming teach me anything? Absolutely. It taught me that English is, indeed, a language and not just the stuff that dribbles out of one’s mouth, or from pen to paper. That there’s both rhyme and reason to its structure. And it taught me to pay attention to every element of a sentence, and how to improve that sentence by jettisoning unnecessary words and retaining only the essential. Deepen your worldviewwith Monitor Highlights.Politics with respectGet political stories with respectful analysis.There‘s a world of new ideas in everyBooks newsletter.There‘s more to life, enrich yours withCulture & Learning weekly.Follow humanity‘s discoveries withScience & Nature stories in your inbox.Gain a spiritual perspectivefrom the stories in your inbox.Want to understand the deeper impact of critical events? Learn the Monitor‘s insight.Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. In this light, I’d like to thank my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Shaw, who always meant well, even when she was imparting her benign discipline:I mean every word of it. ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LoginReal news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908 to lift the standard of journalism and uplift humanity. We aim to “speak the truth in love.” Our goal is not to tell you what to think, but to give you the essential knowledge and understanding to come to your own intelligent conclusions. Join us in this mission by subscribing.