Website on diagramming sentences

luxintenebrae

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Woah, that's the coolest thing ever! Ever!!! So helpful. :D Thank you, Reph!
 

Mac H.

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I've always wondered what the point of 'diagramming' a sentence was.

I'm still wondering.

Can someone give me a problem which is solved by diagramming a sentence ?

Mac
(Apart from insomnia)
 
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reph

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Mac H. said:
I've always wondered what the point of 'diagramming' a sentence was.
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.

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."
 

JAlpha

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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


Thank you, Reph:Clap: Great site.

I use the parse tree option in my Word Perfect program all the time, because I do tend to use a number of long sentences from time to time, and I like to make sure they are properly constructed---easier said then done, for me :)
 

luxintenebrae

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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."

Looks like I need to visit that site quite often - That sentence sounded perfectly fine to me! I had to read it a couple times before realizing you were right. Someday I will master subordinate clauses! ;)
 

m00bah

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I have been studying sentence diagramming over the last day and there have been several good websites and youtube videos and I think I have a decent grasp of it. My question is, how would you go about using this to spot errors in a sentence? All the examples have been with coherent sentences. Would trying to draw a diagram for a sentence that wasn't laid out correctly be a nightmare to do? Thanks.
 

Maryn

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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
 

m00bah

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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

Thanks Maryn, that helps! When I first read your example I still looked at 'prisoners' and thought it was the Subject. I guess it does come in handy to think in terms of diagramming because then you can separate out what belongs to what! :)
 

m00bah

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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

Forgot to ask, how would you amend 'receive' to a singular form?
 

thothguard51

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I think receive would depend on the tense of the scene. Present tense, receives, past tense, received. As is, receive does not work...or so I understand.

Great site, added to my writers references sites already...