Sentence Diagramming

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a good friend at her new house. What a lovely mini-vacation it turned out to be. The dogs played at the beach, we had great conversation with a little wine and I got a chance to get away. My friend, who is now retired, was a teacher for 33 years. We chatted about the different highschool subjects and challenges. One of the interesting English grammar tools I discovered in our conversation is a Sentence Diagram. My friend discussed her dismay that such a great tool was no longer in curriculums for students. I have often found graphic representation of a concept or technique to be easier to understand than a formula. I had a terrible time with Algebra which prevented my progression to University. It only made sense when I ended up spraying herbicide in a field. X Roundup concentrate to Y water to cover Z sq. ft. coverage, or something like that.

With Sentence Diagramming, demonstrated in the example below, you can see how each component of the sentence is diagramed in its relation to the word it is associated with. "And" is a conjunction to "encourages" and "participates", which are verbs. Nouns such as "Society" are an adjective modifier of "management", etc. "In" is a preposition for "discrimination".

The diagram above is based on the Reed-Kellogg system published in 1877. The pictorial representation of the sentence structure was created by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg and published in Higher Lessons in English. The diagram starts with a horizontal base line with the subject on the left and a line separating the predicate on the right. The predicate must have a verb and when and object is included, is seperated by a line ending in the base line. A direct object line is vertical whereas a predicate noun or adjective uses a line at an angle, similar to a backslash, angled towards the subject.

In the example above, the sentence starts with 2 verbs with "and" as the coordinating conjunction. "Is", being the verb, is on the right side with "behaviour" being the noun.

Give it a try below or here