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The Dying Art of Diagramming Sentences
By Liz Bulkley on Tuesday, January 16, 2007.
Tonight on the Front Porch, we're kicking it old school. Remember that feeling you'd get as you walked to the front of the classroom, picked up that heavy piece of chalk, and attempted to diagram a sentence in front of the whole class? Well, lots of today's students don't get that privilege anymore, because diagramming seems to be going the way of the Dodo. Tonight we'll talk about the dying art of diagramming sentences and what we'd do without it.
Our guests are:
Kitty Burns Florey, author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.
Georgia Brussard, Seventh Grade English Teacher at McKelvie Middle School in Bedford.
We'll also hear a profile of American poet and writer Joyce Kilmer, produced by Sarah Elzas.
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I have a textbook on my shelf called Transformational Grammar". It comes from a course 15 years ago about the grammatical ideas of Noam Chomsky. It is full of sentence diagrams, to help understand a Chomskian analysis of sentences. They are similar to traditional diagramming. Can you say anything about this newer variation of the old diagramming?
Some form of diagramming can be useful in learning the concepts underlying the notion of parts of speech, the latter being related to English orthography. (ex. in explaining why we write "practical", not "practicle".)