For those who've been out of school too long or who went to school too recently to diagram sentences:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm
They never told us in school exactly what the point was, but I understand it like this. A sentence has a structure, as an equation does. If you diagram enough sentences and internalize the templates for ways to construct them, you'll come to see the structures of sentences. You'll avoid certain kinds of mistakes that come from not knowing what the parts are and how they fit together.Mac H. said:I've always wondered what the point of 'diagramming' a sentence was.
reph said:For those who've been out of school too long or who went to school too recently to diagram sentences:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm
reph said:For instance, you won't write "John is one of the few ventriloquists who can drink a glass of water while his dummy talks." You'll know it should say "while their dummies talk" because everything after "ventriloquists" is a subordinate clause (in the diagram, it goes below the main line) and the antecedent of "his" isn't "John," it's "ventriloquists."
reph is long-gone, I'm sorry to say, and I'm no reph. But what a diagram of a sentence with mistakes can do is give you the visual cues needed to identify what part of the sentence each word fulfills.
Consider this sentence: Each of the prisoners receive bedding. Its subject, each, is singular, and its verb, receive, is plural. This is a mistake, one that's easy to make because the word prisoners, a plural, is right next to the plural verb.
But if you were to diagram it, your main SVO (subject, verb, object) line would be each receive bedding, with the prepositional phrase of the prisoners suspended from the each. You'd see that the subject and verb do not match, and you'd fix it, because that's the kind of swell person you are.
Maryn, who struggled to invent a good hard enough to spot
reph is long-gone, I'm sorry to say, and I'm no reph. But what a diagram of a sentence with mistakes can do is give you the visual cues needed to identify what part of the sentence each word fulfills.
Consider this sentence: Each of the prisoners receive bedding. Its subject, each, is singular, and its verb, receive, is plural. This is a mistake, one that's easy to make because the word prisoners, a plural, is right next to the plural verb.
But if you were to diagram it, your main SVO (subject, verb, object) line would be each receive bedding, with the prepositional phrase of the prisoners suspended from the each. You'd see that the subject and verb do not match, and you'd fix it, because that's the kind of swell person you are.
Maryn, who struggled to invent a good hard enough to spot