I’m glad sentence diagramming is still, precariously, with us—and not only because I’m at the stage of life where my childhood has taken on a rosy, mythic glow. I think it’s probably good for kids, though not for any of the traditional reasons. My memories of Sister B’s class are of a form of play that demystified the use of language and all its parts, maybe in the same way that Monopoly taught us about money and greed. Unlike most things we did in school, diagramming had a quality of entertainment.
It also had another virtue. Writing can be terrifying for students in those vulnerable and insecure pre-teen years. This wasn’t true for me—I’ve been shamelessly willing to put my thoughts on paper at the drop of a pencil for as long as I can remember—but for my old sixth-grade friend Rosamond, a blank page was almost as intimidating as the after-school dances the nuns forced us to attend a year or so later, with Buddy Holly blaring tinnily from a portable record player, the boys milling around (staring at their shoes, hands in pockets, snickering) on one side of the room, and the girls (making small-talk, each one wondering miserably why she wore that horrible skirt that makes her look fat and must be the reason no one is dancing with her) on the other. Rosamond says that, for her, writing was just that ghastly: when “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”-time came around, her hands went clammy and her mind went blank.
But diagramming—that was another world. The only thing that mattered was whether a sentence was diagrammed correctly, and that could be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction by means of a few intersecting lines. It was a game; it wasn’t about you. There was no room for opinion. You weren’t being judged on the contents of your soul or the quality of your imagination. You weren’t writing drivel, you weren’t failing to do justice to an idea that gripped you, you weren’t afraid of being too fanciful or too dry or too simple-minded—all you needed was accuracy. Brilliant diagramming, unlike brilliant writing, was something that could be learned.
It’s debatable whether diagramming did anyone much quantifiable good. For kids with neat handwriting and an artistic sense, it was a chance to show off. For left-brainers who had little interest in English classes, it was a mathlike treat. For a shy girl like me, it was an opportunity to perform in public in a small way without knees knocking and sweat rolling down my back. And for a handful of students who simply weren’t adept at such things, it was one reinforcement among many of the pesky basics of English. No one learned grammar by diagramming a sentence. It could show us the language at work, with all its nuts and bolts on display, but, if our grasp of grammar hadn’t been soundly beaten into us before we ventured on our first wobbly diagrams, Sister B might as well have been teaching her sixth-graders how to paint a sentence in egg tempera or sing it in D-flat major.
Among the people I’ve talked to about it, the consensus seems to be that learning diagramming may have helped us to understand the functions of words, to think more logically about language, and maybe even to write more correctly. But it didn’t help us write well. The admittedly small and eccentric sampling I consulted (half a dozen teachers, a bunch of fiction writers, a screenwriter, a journalist, a couple of editors, two artists, and a gardener) was almost unanimous in believing it did not—though their opinions ranged from “probably didn’t hurt” (most) to “irrelevant fun” (many) to “soul-destroying nonsense” (one, who adds, “Patterns and predictability and assigned seating simply don’t interest me as much as quirky words and wayward usage.”). On home-schooling websites, parents tend to favor diagramming, believing that it helps at least some kids understand what a correct sentence is all about. But the constant refrain is that it all depends on the kid. And teachers who swear by diagramming see it as one useful tool among many.
I’m convinced that diagramming was no help to me at all as a writer. I came out of my 1950s Catholic-school education writing hyper-correct but pretentious, showy, self-conscious prose that had awed my high-school teachers. Great things were predicted for me. Surely this was the work of a Real Writer! Then, in my first year of college, an English professor spent an hour kindly explaining how I could make my writing less stiff and pompous—an hour that I can honestly say changed my life.66
There are plenty of valid arguments against diagramming. After all, it doubles the task of the student, who has to learn a whole new set of rules (where does that dang-busted line go, and which way does it slant?) in order to illustrate an old set of rules that, in fact, has already been learned pretty thoroughly by immersion in the language from birth. Who’s going to make a mistake with a sentence like The dog barked? (The barked dog? Dog the barked?) Gertrude Stein makes a good point: English grammar is really quite simple. It’s only the subtleties that are difficult—who vs. whom, adjective vs. adverb, lie vs. lay. The Internet is full of websites with titles like “The 10 Worst Grammatical Errors in English,” and, frankly, they don’t amount to much. Surely elaborate diagrams aren’t necessary to illustrate them.
It also seems to be true that, over the years, teachers—and certainly students—have become more willing to accept the idea that sentences that can be popped into a diagram aren’t always sentences anyone wants to write. And indeed language can be more supple and interesting than the patterns that perfect syntax forces on it. As we’ve seen, Faulkner and James and Stein and, in fact, most writers at one time or another, have demonstrated the limitations of Sister Bernadette’s neatly bundled sentences.
Diagramming isn’t dead—it’s just resting. The practice is in the process of recovering from the steep slide into marginality that began in the 1960s. Considering the emphasis placed on systemized tasks in education these days, you might think that diagramming—the equivalent of coloring inside the lines—would be clutched to the bosoms of educators with glad little cries. Diagramming prowess, unlike essay-writing, can be measured on standardized tests. But the climb back up is slow. An English teacher I spoke with told me (not happily) that such close attention to the making of correct sentences is now considered dull and dreary—that it interferes with “the full flow of the students’ creativity”: if they have to think about making every little thing correct, how can they express themselves? As I remember it, the last thing you were expected to do at my school in the ’50s was express yourself. You were indeed expected to make every little thing correct, and if you inadvertently expressed yourself in the process—well, Sister Bernadette might just grab you by the ear and drag you to the principal’s office.
The ’60s are often blamed for the ascendance of “self-expression” and “creativity” over rigor and discipline and the well-wrought sentence, not to mention neatly trimmed hair, premarital chastity, and respect for your elders. During a time when a number of ideas were being weighed in the balance and found wanting (ah, those QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper stickers!), conventional teaching methods didn’t escape. Most people would agree that the reading and writing of traditionally correct English have deteriorated since Sister Bernadette’s dog began to bark. Maybe we should blame that on the decline of the Reed and Kellogg empire. More likely, we should blame couch potato-ism, a lack of interest in reading literature, the example of our more illiterate public figures, and a general whatever-ism.
But, even if correct English was brought to its knees by those laid-back hippie values, some of the healthier lessons of the ’60s have persisted—and a good thing, too. It was discovered in about 1968 that kids are human and fallible, and most teachers today acknowledge that. They no longer rap knuckles or make students stay after school to do mindless punitive exercises. They probably don’t often order them to stand in the wastebasket, as I was made to do in first grade for talking in class (“If you act like trash, Miss Burns, we’ll treat you like trash”), or charge them pennies for dropping pencils (fifth grade), or threaten to expel them for saying “heck” (tenth grade). They’re a lot more careful now than they were in my schooldays about ridiculing students who are slow to catch on and glorifying the superstars at the expense of everyone else.
The
teachers I’ve talked to who teach diagramming seem to have found a nice balance: the kids are free to express themselves, but they’re being taught the skills they need—and diagramming is one aspect of that teaching—to express themselves not only freely but also in correct, intelligible English that’s a pleasure rather than a chore to read.
In the end, I think the important thing was not what we learned from diagramming in Sister Bernadette’s class, but simply the fun we had doing it. Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn’t bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.
Sometimes, on a long subway ride or a boring car trip, I mentally diagram a sentence, just as I occasionally try to remember the declension of hic, haec, hoc or the words to the second verse of The Star-Spangled Banner. And, in an occasional fit of nostalgia and creeping curmudgeonhood, I return to those golden afternoons when
* * *
66 And the years have shown me that Virginia Woolf’s comment on the subject is the real truth: “Style is a very simple matter: all rhythm. Once you get that you can’t use the wrong words.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For assistance with the research for this book, my biggest thank-you goes to Gene Moutoux (www.geocities.com/gene_moutoux/), who patiently constructed the difficult diagrams and advised me about the rest. Without Gene, the diagrams here would probably get not only a flunking grade but a rap on the knuckles from Sister Bernadette. Any errors, however, are solely the responsibility of the author.
I am also grateful to Rebecca McFarlan and Laura Shearer.
In addition, thanks to Jessica Auerbach, Rosamond Bennati, Carl Rubino, Ron Savage, the Suffolk County Historical Society, and Heather Walters, the archivist at Polytechnic University (formerly Brooklyn Polytechnic).
This book would not exist without the farsightedness of my publisher, Dennis Johnson, and the intelligence and plain hard work of my editor, Becky Kraemer. I am more grateful to them both than I can express.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KITTY BURNS FLOREY, a veteran copy editor, is the author of nine novels and many short stories and essays. A longtime Brooklyn resident, she now divides her time between central Connecticut and upstate New York with her husband, Ron Savage.
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