Stop fidgeting. Sit up straight, eyes forward, all eyes on the blackboard. Today we're going to diagram sentences. "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog" is the title of a new book on sentence diagramming.

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 ...

A brain helps, and so does a computer, but surely one of our most essential tools is some kind of diagramming system. How can we think about a sentence’s structure, after all, without displaying ...

When we first learned how to diagram sentences back in middle school, it was a total pain in the ass. The exercise was complicated and seemingly superfluous. How useful was scrawling a preposition ...

Nobody can top my sentences. Photo by Richard Ellis/Getty Images At the Slate Political Gabfest's live D.C. show this week, Emily, David, and John tried to diagram a sentence uttered in Sun City ...

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 ...

Once a popular way to teach grammar, the practice of diagramming sentences has fallen out of favor. When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence ...