Sentence Diagramming

As Mrthoth (2007) shows in his YouTube video, one of the best ways to understand writing is to understand grammar—and one of the best ways to understand grammar is to understand sentence diagramming. I did not receive much sentence diagramming instruction in my time at school, but I did learn it on my own because I was interested in it as a concept and thought it was fun to do.

I think sentence diagramming as Mrthoth (2007) explains can be used to help students understand grammatical structure because it allows you to diagram the parts of the sentence—i.e., the grammar—just like a builder would diagram the parts of a house or a biologist would diagram the parts of the body. The grammar can be visually depicted with each of the words performing a role, either acting as the subject or verb or as a modifier or object or so on.

I would like to use this method to help teach grammar because I believe it can be very helpful and useful in that students like to see how sentences are constructed. The diagramming technique is a good way to reinforce how words operate. You can see that syntax is important because phrases and words will modify other phrases and words and so everything is ultimately connected. A badly written sentence will have words and phrases with no defined role or purpose, and this type of exercise can help students see that. A properly written sentence will be able to be diagrammed fully so that you can show how every single word is being used. I would have students do this with sentences that they write so that they can practice seeing how they are doing in their sentence construction. The class would diagram one another’s sentences on the board, and there would be races too to keep the activities fun and engaging. The more time spent diagramming the more likely students are to fully acquire grammatical skills