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diagramming sentences
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I’ve heard that diagramming sentences is beneficial and I’ve also heard it’s totally unnecessary…can anyone help with this topic?
I’ll be happy to throw in my $0.02 worth. 🙂
Diagramming sentences is a great exercise in analyzing. Taking apart a sentence and putting the pieces back together in a logical way can give the child a real sense of how sentences are structured. The exercise can help as they craft their own sentences in written narrations or leisure time writing. Even for those children who don’t want to do a lot of writing on their own, it’s a great exercise in logical/analytical thinking.
Those who say that it’s a waste of time are probably thinking along practical lines. Let’s face it, when in life do we ever diagram sentences once we’re done with grammar classes? However, we need to remember that diagramming is not an end to itself; it is a means to the end goal of communicating clearly and effectively, as well as being able to analyze, pull apart, and piece back together accurately.
(And we will award extra credit to any who want to diagram that last sentence. Whew! 😉 )
LOL! I once assigned one of those paragraph-long sentences from Robinson Crusoe to a kid to be diagrammed, and he did it! LOL
I love diagramming. I find it very useful. In fact, in teaching things like dependent clauses and things like that, I never really “got” it until I had a teacher who taught me to diagram, and then I understood. I’m a visual learner, though, so it just makes sense to me. But I taught my kids to diagram, and it’s really helped, I think. Now I can just tell them, when I see a sentence they’ve written that has poor use of clauses, or lacks agreement, or has fuzzy adjectives or something, “Go diagram that one” and they come back and can “fix” it once they see the problem.
Plus diagramming is kind of like a puzzle–it’s a lot more interesting, IMO, to diagram things than to just copy them out endlessly and label the parts of speech and clauses over them. Give me a nice diagram any day. 🙂
These are all wonderful reasons to learn to diagram. Would you say that Analytical Grammar does a good job at teaching how to diagram a sentence? I need to learn myself-before I can teach my boys. 🙂
Definitely. Diagramming is one of the strengths of the Analytical Grammar program. Robin explains it in simple language, gives examples, and diagrams all the sentences in the teacher book for you.
One note: I asked one of my older daughters to answer this question about Why diagram?, and as we were discussing it she mentioned that one of the reasons she enjoyed diagramming with AG was because I didn’t require them to diagram every sentence in every exericise/lesson. I allowed them to select anywhere from three to half of the sentences. I thought that was plenty of practice (without overkill) since they were doing a lesson each day.
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