The recently revised Standards of Learning of the Commonwealth of Virginia consider sentence diagramming an “essential skill” and mandate that it be taught in grades 6-8. Frankly, if English teachers ...

Sentence diagramming is the long division of English. It involves a bewildering array of lines and diagonal branches. It is loathed as an elementary school chore. And it is presumed to be obsolete.

Create an account or log in to save stories. The design firm Pop Chart Lab has taken the first lines of famous novels and diagrammed those sentences. This one shows the opening of Franz Kafka's ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month.Become a Plus Member What tools does a grammarian need? A brain helps, and so does a computer, but ...

Sentence diagramming was once a widespread technique for teaching kids how to analyze the structure of a sentence. If you had to do it in school, you either loved it or you hated it. Most kids hated ...

Once a popular way to teach grammar, the practice of diagramming sentences has fallen out of favor. When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming ...

When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren’t taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a ...