diagramming the Preamble

redkudu left a link to this diagram of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and I had to post it:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Lost Art of Sentence Diagramming

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. --Gertrude Stein

After reading this amusing article in the American Educator, I think sentence diagramming has a bad rap. It sounds like fun.

(Cross Posted at Perfect Score Project)

onward and upward, part 2

Hainish writes:

I had a fantastic English teacher in grade 7. We did diagramming sentences, the whole nine yards. For me, it was the best part of ELA.

I found out recently that she had been under pressure more and more to abandon that sort of teaching and do more of the readers'/writers' workshop crap that took hold in my district. So she quit, or retired early. (She was not exactly young when she left, but it was a loss for the students.)

I got to see a grade 8 ELA classroom last year at the same school. A row of small, colorful clay models of various objects (presumably, revealing each student's inner soul) lined one wall of the classroom.

Martha Kolln's 10 core sentences

Tips for Teaching Grammar: Sentence Diagramming (pdf file)

punctuating by breath

from Sentence Diagramming: A Step-by-Step Approach to Learning Grammar Through Diagramming:

Before the 1960s, grammar and punctuation were taught as foundation blocks for writing instruction. In the 1960s, some research questioned the value of teaching grammar, and new ways of teaching grammar cast doubt on the traditional methods. In the midst of all this change, the baby was thrown out with the bath water where grammar was concerned, and when the 1970s rolled around, a new generation of teachers had not been trained to teach grammar and punctuation.

I am a member of that new generation of teachers, and a product of a writing education with little structured or sustained lessons in grammar. Thankfully, one of my teachers believed in teaching grammar and punctuation through sentence diagramming. Before this instruction, I lacked confidence in my writing because I didn't know for sure if my sentences were really sentences.

I can still remember the great "aha!" feeling I had when I realized that I could analyze a sentence without the teacher's assistance--I could mentally diagram the sentence to determine if it was grammatically correct. What a sense of power that gave me!

Marye Hefty

I find this remarkable.

Mary Hefty earned a Masters degree in English and then worked as an editor in a research laboratory, but as a child (or teen?) she could not tell whether she had or had not written a sentence.

Crazy!

She goes on:

When I left the research laboratory to become a college professor, teaching English composition and technical writing, I noticed during the first term that many of my students' papers were riddled with grammar and punctuation errors. I didn't know how to add the necessary instruction in grammar and punctuation skills to our limited class time without letting it take over the class like a weed. Typically, I tried a band-aid approach to teaching grammar and punctuation. When I saw sentence fragments in the students' papers, I talked about sentence fragments. When I saw comma splices, I talked about those. It didn't take long to realize that many of my students didn't recognize a sentence, so they couldn't solve the sentence problems. My students were just like I had been--needing structure and an organized way to learn grammar and punctuation without having the approach overwhelm them or make it difficult for them to learn the writing process in class.

In several classes, I decided to discard the band-aid approach and devote 10 percent of the class time to teaching the students grammar and punctuation, starting with the basics--What is a simple sentence? How do you diagram it? And guess what? It worked.

I've been teaching sentence diagramming in some of my courses for eight years now, and the students who begin my classes not being able to identify or define a simple sentence leave the class with the vocabulary and knowledge to identify simple, compound, and complex sentences; fragments; run-ons; and comma splices. Most importantly, the students have a foundation that enables them to learn more--without my help--after they leave the class.

Surprisingly, my university students don't mind having to learn grammar and punctuation through sentence diagramming because this approach quickly gives them the skills and confidence to fix the problems in their papers on their own. I have heard enough anecdotal evidence from my students to know that sentence diagramming works. For example, one of my former students told me that she was asked to edit letters for her boss. She said that before taking my class, she just put in the commas in where she thought she heard a pause and just guessed that the sentences were correct. "Now I know for sure, and I can really help," she said.

A lot of my students -- these are college freshmen -- "punctuate by breath."

Punctuating by breath is OK as far as it goes, I think. Now that I'm learning the formal rules of punctuation, I realize I've been breaking some of those rules for decades. I've been breaking the rules because a) I didn't know them, so b) I've been punctuating by breath.

Having thought it over, I've decided to carry on punctuating by breath when the occasion calls for it. If I want or don't want a comma somewhere,  then a comma there will or will not be. I'm the decider.

Still and all, the reason this works for me is that I have never, ever, in my entire adult life, failed to recognize a complete sentence. Nor have I failed to write a complete sentence if that's what I wanted to write.

I have come to the realization that a course about writing is a course about sentences.

back to the future

West Ashley High ninth-grader Erika Wesolek works on a grammar lesson Thursday.

A reading program given a trial run last year at West Ashley High School has been so successful that other Charleston County and neighboring Dorchester 2 high schools have taken notice and may begin using it.

In Charleston, the curriculum had been used exclusively with special education students. School Principal Mary Runyon saw those students' reading scores improving and decided to experiment and see whether it also would work for students who didn't have a disability.

The research-based curriculum, Language!, teaches English as if it were a foreign language; it breaks down its rules and explains them to students. The class focuses on the five components of reading -- from identifying sounds in words to developing vocabulary -- and the goal is to give students the foundation they need to become better readers.

[snip]

Dorchester 2 Deputy Superintendent Barbara Stroble took a group of her high school teachers to West Ashley High last week to observe the program and get a better understanding of the way it works. Although Dorchester 2, which includes Summerville area schools, is one of the state's higher-performing districts, nearly 13 percent of its freshmen can't read better than a fourth-grader, according to an analysis requested by The Post and Courier.

[snip]

"It's the old way we used to teach English," Stroble said. "A kid who's having difficulty in reading and he or she doesn't know the rules of the game, they get lost."

Freshman Amber Armstrong is in the West Ashley High program this year. She always thought her reading was fine, but after being in this class, she said she feels more confident because she's learning skills that none of her previous schools taught her.

She used to skip words she didn't know, but now she tries to figure out what they mean. It's easier for her to skim through notes and pick out important points, and vocabulary isn't as much of a challenge, she said. She doesn't use slang and she uses correct verbs when speaking. She said she'd like to take the course again next year.

Giant strides
by Diette Courrege
The Post and Courier
Monday, February 22, 2010

Here in my town, it's common knowledge that the kids are gaining all their knowledge of grammar from foreign language classes.

Not from "ELA."