Comment by your-nanny
6 years ago
In middle school I was placed, by standardized testing, into bonehead classes, where I was extremely bored, not because I was so smart that I knew it already, but because it was boring. I took a writing elective course, impressed the teacher sufficiently that she got me into eighth grade honors English, where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. I lived it, but I struggled to get my C. Getting extra credit for reading Chaucer, on my own initiative, probably made the difference--or more likely my teachers good will and support. Teachers count.
Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.
>where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess.
The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casually discussing the books with the students. The first words he said to the class on day one was "I don't want to hear the word preposition, and I don't think you do either."
Actually the sentence diagramming was useful introduction to a type of analysis. Not too different from computer science foundations of programming languages, automata, etc
I would argue that sentence diagramming is of dubious use outside of an ESL or primary school class. And even then the English language is such a self-contradicting mongrel tongue that it's effectively rule-less.
It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.