- One or two of my junior-high-school English teachers—public school, California, around 1970—showed us how to diagram sentences. I don’t remember diagramming (note the spelling) being pushed hard at us, but it did help me start to understand things like clauses, modification, and parts of speech. Later, in college and graduate school, I majored in linguistics, and the transformational grammar popular at the time went whole-hog with a very different system for analyzing the structure of sentences. Although my linguistics teachers were uniformly dismissive of school-taught approaches to grammar like diagramming, in the decades since those less rigorous methods have been more useful to me when writing and editing English.
- I had difficulty with English grammar when I was young, until I was taught by an older lady who still taught her classes to diagram sentences.
For whatever reason, it all fell into place easily using that method.
by 082349872349872
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- Knuth both enjoyed diagramming sentences in K-12 and wrote compilers during the summer in university. I believe these facts are probably related.
- Sentence diagramming puzzle app on iOS. (Note: Puzzles not an auto-solver).
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sengram-sentence-diagramming/i...
(FYI: I am the developer).
- I learned English that way. I didn’t necessarily could speak it well, but gosh darn it, I knew all the tenses: present perfect, future perfect continuous, etc. Pretty sure most students graduating high school in US have never heard of such silliness.
To be fair, it laid everything out well, and it did help me understand English better.
by AlbertCory
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- I went to a Catholic grammar school (yes, I guess that's a pun there). We didn't learn any science, but we sure learned our grammar. Including diagramming sentences (I don't remember all those refinements, though). The process is pretty helpful.
I find that book reader to be very unappealing, and for this Fremont Older book, which I'm currently writing about:
https://archive.org/details/myownstory00oldegoog
I downloaded the PDF. I think they should have done that here, too and extracted some actual diagrams.
- I would be interested in the people who did structural/functional diagramming and views to the concrete/solidity of "that's not proper english" or "that isn't how it works" because the other side of the coin is that english (and obviously other languages: Spanish and gender..) change over time, and are fluid against the needs of their speakers.
I guess I'm arguing that if you did training in the formalism of a parse-tree, I wonder if it tends to re-inforce a view in "proper" use of a language rather than it's emergent behaviour and shifts of meaning.
by garcia3252
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