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.

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 ...

Say “sentence diagramming” to people of a certain age, and you get reactions ranging from, “Oh, I was really good at that in eighth grade,” to “Mrs. Green made us diagram The Rime of the Ancient ...

In her small classroom at Gaithersburg High School, English teacher Robyn Jackson draws a complicated pattern of horizontal and diagonal lines on the blackboard. Her students bend over their notebooks ...

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 ...

The writer Stephen King pushes people who want to write well to "read, read, read." Reading a wide variety of writing can feel like riding waves of language: words, sentences, paragraphs — all of ...

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 ...