To learn how something works, take it apart

As an adolescent, I learned to diagram sentences. People that age rarely know what that means anymore.

When you diagram a sentence, you create a kind of map of it, like a wiring diagram or a flow chart, that illustrates exactly how all the words in that sentence relate to each other and what roles they play. I guess you could also say it’s like a family tree, with lines connecting related people so that you can see that Jennifer is William’s sister, and Deborah is Jenny and Will’s mom, and she’s married to Roger, who has six brothers named after the planets (so Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, and Roger), so Jenny and Will are the cousins of Pluto’s daughters Saskia and Eunice. Family relationships can be confusing when verbally described, especially when people of different generations have the same names (how many Neptune Nesbits must there be before someone admits to a mistake?), but a diagram makes the relationships clearer.

And this is exactly what diagramming a sentence does. It flags the noun that is the subject of the sentence, the verb that is the predicate, and hangs all the modifiers off them like ornaments on a Christmas tree so that you see immediately that the subject-verb agreement in this dependent clause has gone awry and needs to be fixed, or that this adjective has wandered too close to something it doesn’t modify, or Eunice and Will Nesbit should not be permitted to date.

This excellent piece from Newsday makes the case for reimposing this tedious and aggravating but immensely instructive exercise on the nation’s young people, not instead of encouraging creativity but along with it.

Not every child is going to become a creative writer, but all of them will become adults who probably will need to write a cover letter, a memo, an essay, a love note or a legal argument. They will need to know how to express their thoughts in understandable ways, and to do that, they’ll need to know where to place commas.

Hear, hear! Whether or not you write novels, essays, or poetry, pretty much everyone is called upon to write a cover letter, a performance review, an online dating profile, or an email to a stranger. A few years’ hard labor diagramming sentences when you are young and resilient and likely to survive the experience gives you a lot more confidence in your written communication skills for the rest of your life. So … it’s a life sentence. OK, I’ll stop.