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 ...

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 ...

I don’t know why the Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch diagrammed part of a sentence in one of his legal opinions. Following the Reed-Kellogg norms that Mark Liberman of Language Log once ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Dori Monson Show is on KIRO Newsradio (weekdays Noon-3). Dori needs some help from any listeners who are English majors and grammar enthusiasts. Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien recently ...

Ever wondered what makes action movies — often cheesy and grandiose — timeless favorites? Aside from the weapons and explosions, dialogue probably plays a larger role than most think. And like books, ...