Amy Lynn Hess - Diagramming Sentences: A Playful Way to Analyze Everyday Language

Why Learn to Diagram Sentences?

Diagramming sentences is a great way for kinesthetic learners to learn about grammar with a hands-on approach. It's also perfect for visual learners or those who learn by seeing patterns, charts, graphs, and diagrams. From a pedagogical or andragogical standpoint, sentence diagrams are one of the most thorough and concrete methods for assessing very specific grammatical knowledge. For students and teachers both, this means more personalized diagnostic testing and more meaningful lesson planning.

In addition to helping isolate specific points of grammar and sentence construction, the basic repetitive principles of diagramming can be applied to any sentence as a way to help unravel the meaning of that sentence. This, then, leads to better and more thorough reading comprehension skills.

It follows that if a person practices analyzing the sentences that other people write or say, and that person gets good at understanding what makes a sentence make good sense, then the sentences the diagrammer writes or says will start making more sense, too. In other words, diagramming makes writers better writers and critical thinkers.

What is Diagramming?

As stated above, diagramming is a systematic, repetitive process that can be applied to individual sentences as a way to unravel the meaning of that sentence. It helps visual learners learn to see the patterns in grammar. It gives kinesthetic learners an activity with a set of step-by-step guidelines for analyzing language. It allows all students to learn what makes sentences effective sentences.

Most importantly, it is a process that slows writing down and makes writers truly think about language.

What is a Sentence?

As there is no one-to-one correlation between any thought and any set of words used to express the thought, we cannot truthfully define a sentence as a complete thought. We can, however, define a sentence as a close representation of a complete thought . The closer to our thoughts we can make our sentences, the more effectively we communicate.

More pragmatically, we can define a sentence as a group of words, properly punctuated, that contains a subject and a verb and makes a complete thought (not necessary a one-to-one correlation to our exact complete thought).

There are several bits and pieces of language we use to express our thoughts each and every day. Some of those bits and pieces are parts of speech, and others are parts of a sentence. There are eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives (including articles), adverbs, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections. There are five parts of a sentence: subjects, predicates, clauses, phrases, and modifiers.

W ith a basic knowledge of just those thirteen bits and pieces, we can begin diagramming sentences.