Have you ever diagrammed a sentence
 

I'm just curious who had to do this in school?

http://blogs.oracle.com/fusionecm/co...ce_diagram.jpg

Me.

Yep. Perhaps one of the most worthless exercises and biggest wastes of time I had to endure.

I went to Catholic Schools.

Yes.

Yes. Public school mid 80's.

I still do it for fun. I also love to study my old math texts

Yup... We sure did, and I graduated in 2009!


And I agree that it was a rather futile exercise....

I think the intent was to get you to understand sentence composition better and to be clear about which part of a sentence a given word might be modifying (i.e. adjective versus adverb, etc.) but somehow I never got that out of it at all. It just wasn't a particularly effective learning tool in that regard.

I guess some kids get the stuff conceptually very fast (I was one) and some don't and need other ways to get it in their heads and (I'm guessing) this is just one more way to present the concept so some kids will "get it".

Having to present and re-present the same concepts over and over five or six different ways so that every kid in the class "gets it" is tedious but probably necessary, especially in bigger and bigger classrooms. The counterpoint is it's frustrating to see so much needless repetition in the classroom and the consequence is that everyone gets held back by the ones that need to see the stuff from so many different angles in order to grasp it. The politically incorrect (but honest) term for this is "dumbing down".

Yep.

I did it back in the stone ages.

I had to endure NEW MATH as well.

Yup. Conceptually I can appreciate it - I think it gets lost on young minds. The idea was to be able to equate building a sentence the way you would build a house. It is not a bad way to go about teaching structure but may have been better if main-streamers used a true kinetic method and really had them assemble sentences using tinker toys or Lego blocks: Green = Subject, Blue = Verb, Yellow = Conjunction, Red = Pronoun, Orange = Adverb.

Hay, thats really not a bad idea huh? Hmmm.....

I went to a private school from the 5th grade until half way through the 8th grade. We diagrammed a lot of sentences. It was murder, but I think a lot of folks don't understand subjects, verbs, phrases, adjectives, etc.... I think it's useful when learning the rules for punctuation. If you don't know what the parts of a sentence are, then how can you effectively punctuate?

Yep, do they still do it because the way some folks write today really scares the shlt out of me.

Diagram that!! :D

LOL! Dats sum funny schizz right their bro. These old guys thinkin they was better at writing and stuff B4 but we all know they wasnt.

yes! can't you tell?

:)

wht r u talking bout? LOL!

Yes! Found it useful and challenging in grade school (1941-1949)

Best,
Tom

+1

Started 1st grade in Sept. of '48...That should 'splain it. Of course we diagrammed sentences. Phonics was the method for teaching reading...

Yes. Take a PITA language (English) and make it more confusing for a poor kid by doing that crap.

I before E except after C, or when sounded as A like in "neighbor" and "weigh", or when it appears in comparatives and superlatives, like "fancier", or when the C sounds as shhh as in "glacier", or when the vowel sounds like E like in "seize"...and on and on...