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Quote of the Day: Gertrude Stein on Diagramming Sentences
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.
— Gertrude Stein
Being able to diagram sentences is like being able to read music: many people will think your skill useless, but it can add incredible value to your appreciation and love of the beautiful.
I love language. I love the construction, the usage, the etymology, the comparisons. I like to learn languages — I’ve studied French, German, Japanese, Latin, and am currently learning Spanish, Italian, and Catalan on Duolingo.
One of the things I find deeply exciting, like Gertrude Stein, is how the language hangs together, how the sentence structure can, like the structure of great architecture, support something meaningful.
Grammar can be beautiful, it can be innovative, it can help us frame our thoughts more clearly. For a writer like Stein, clearly, diagramming sentences allowed her to get deeply into the heart of the language as she wrestled with the most effective way to communicate her thoughts.
My teachers in grammar school (parochial school from kindergarten through 8th grade), Dominican nuns, loved diagramming sentences. We all stood at the chalkboard, parsing and laying out the bones of sentences like a fun game.
When I am driving around or hiking or out in a boat, I like to be able to have a mental map of where I am in the geography of the place. Similarly, I grasp the grammar of the sentence by forming a mental picture of the diagram. The diagram helps me travel true, as it were.
In my homeschool, I use a wonderful book in the ninth-grade English course called Grammar by Diagram: Understanding English Grammar Through Traditional Sentence Diagramming, by Cindy Vitto. We have the second edition, but I understand that a third is out. I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you want to study grammar. The book is interesting, well-laid out, methodical. The sentence examples are interesting. There is a complete answer key in the back of the book.
Usually, my students (I’m on my sixth and final student) find it a little tedious at the beginning but then find that they really enjoy the entire process. So far, they all agree that it is one of the best texts they used in their homeschool days.
The back cover of the text is adorned with the Gertrude Stein quote that inspired this essay.
Did you study grammar in your school days? Did you diagram sentences? Did you like it? Have your children studied grammar?
This is part of the February 2023 Quote of the Day Group Writing project. Sign up here.
Published in Group Writing
Note to self: look up, at last, how Turks diagram their sentences.
My kids studied grammar at their classical charter schools and learned to diagram sentences, but I never did. I’m guessing you knew that about me already, though. . .
Welcome back Mama! /the Stein quote cracked me up
I loved diagramming sentences! It was fun for me, and I looked forward to those exercises. I think my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Evans, might have been the first to teach it.
I love writing and words, too, although I’m always bothered by the fact that my vocabulary is pretty limited. I taught business writing classes for many years, and I could always predict the questions people would ask about punctuation and verb agreement (such as with collective nouns). I’m a firm believer of making outlines, even if they are pretty primitive ones!
Love the quote!
I’m looking forward to reading your post on it!
I learned English grammar when I learned German and Russian. I’ve never diagrammed a sentence.
I just looked up that Turkish (like Russian) has 6 cases. I can’t imagine how it would be in Hungarian with 18. That’s a lot of branching.
We did diagram sentences, so I guess I am officially old. My favorite sentence diagramming story is of my dad, who did a brief stint as a substitute 5th grade teacher after retiring at age 62 from his first career. He said he hadn’t diagrammed sentences in over 50 years, and the kids were stunned to be in the presence of someone so ancient!
I learned more about English grammar while studying French in high school than I ever did in an English class. When we homeschooled our son, I used Shurley English, in part because it is scripted but mostly because it is good. You can learn so much about logic by learning the parts of a sentence.
With one exception my English teachers were not very good, and frankly, not very smart. My grammar has been deficient my whole life, but I didn’t realize it until long after I left school.
My college German course was called Kontakt: A Communicative Approach, or something similar. Basically, it meant they never taught us any grammar until about the tenth lesson or so, they expected us to learn grammar organically by repeating little dialogues and patterns. I was so frustrated. Please may we conjugate the verb? Teach me the personal pronouns! Explain the different cases and their endings properly!
Fortunately I had great teachers regarding grammar. When I started to teach business writing, I liked Strunk & White and the Gregg book–can’t remember it’s name. When students wanted to argue with me (and it’s amazing how often they did), I could always reference my source!
I learned Reed-Kellogg (IIRC) diagrams in grade school and then revisited them in college, to my delight.
If you can’t diagram a sentence, the analytical part of your brain might as well be illiterate when trying to determine exactly what a (spoken or written) text means. If you;ve never learned it fine, but if you cannot or will not learn it, then not fine. That won’t stop you from having an opinion, though. I get frustrated at work when otherwise intellligent people cannot reason their way through plain writing, and instead hastily substitute their desired interpretations, which they will then defend.
My understanding of English grammar was greatly enhanced, as others have said, by studying (in my case) Russian, through “the EGSR”, the magnificent book English Grammar for Students of Russian. I think this is because English with its largely positional case marking means that young people adopt the language with no signposts toward case. We find it difficult to formalize case because we never needed to, and we don’t have a well-known case-indicating vocabulary (inflections and such) to fall back on when we are told to now understand it formally.
This doesn’t mean that acquired language is wrong. Just that higher levels of analysis are behind a short wall for native learners of English. We can see what’s over there, but it takes some effort to walk in it.
Could you clarify “case” without a lot of effort? Not sure if I learned about that . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
As an example (pasted in from that Wikipedia article, this will give you a sense of what “case” is — the term in partheses names the case exemplified:
An example of a Russian case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for “sailor”, which belongs to Russian’s first declension class.
BDB note on pronunciations (in order):
Moryak
Moryaka
Moryaku
Moryaka
Moryakom
O / Na / V’ Moryakye
My favorite Gertrude Stein tidbit involves visual arts rather than the written word. Her apartment in France frequently hosted a slew of then-contemporary artists (Picasso, Matisse etc) who’s art she collected. Photos of the interior of that flat depict every vertical surface covered in what is now priceless modern art.
In our language, nouns have three important attributes, case, number and gender.
It is difficult to see case in English because we do not have endings or words that change depending on the case for nouns, only for pronouns, and because all nouns that do not name persons with a sex have the neuter gender, commonly thought of as “it.”
We can see case best illustrated in English by looking at our personal pronouns.
In English we have three cases, nominative, objective and possessive.
Let’s take the first person pronoun singular, “I.” “I” is the nominative case, or subject case as some call it. It is used as the subject of a sentence. (Also as the predicate nominative but I shall not muddy the waters here with the predicate nominative.) “I ate the cake.” (I as subject nominative)
“Me” is the object case. “Give me the cake.” (me as indirect object)
“My” or “mine” is the possessive case. “It is my cake. The cake is mine.”
As you can see with “cake,” the only change we would make in English would be to indicate a plural number by adding “s” to the end of the word. In the first example, cake is the direct object and is in the objective case. In the second example it is again the direct object. In the third and fourth examples cake is in the nominative case as first the predicate nominative and second as the subject.
Kudos for putting actual work into this :-)
Some of it seems to relate to what I learned, but you’re right–not in any formal way. Interesting!
Oops, also in the possessive, in which we add either “apostrophe-s” or “s-apostrophe,” depending on whether or not the word ends in “s” already, at which the user has two choices. (For example, Mr. Jones. We can either say “Mr. Jones’ car” or “Mr. Jones’s car” depending on which rule of usage is followed.)
So, for “cake” we would find “cake’s”, as in, “The cake’s frosting had been disturbed by me.”
The plural “cakes” would be made possessive as follows” “All of the cakes’ frosting had been disturbed by her.”
Referred to as “the Saxon genitive”, which is ripe for giggles and titters.
Well, it’s gotta be more exciting than reading Gertrude Stein’s prose.
I forced myself to slog my way to the end of Three Lives.
Reminded me of this:
For the life of me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything on what that book was about. I remember nothing of it, other than the fact that it was inordinately dull and tedious.
I still get nightmares about the assignment I received in the 7th grade to diagram the Preamble to the Constitution. I had papers spread out all over the kitchen table. (Shudder)
Yikes! That would have been tough!
It was.
So how would we diagram:
I wonder. I guess the subject is (you) (that was how I learned to write the subject of an imperative verb, “you, understood” back in the day). Is “Dick” a direct object? and is “run” actually an infinitive, as in (“You see Dick to run”) as someone once claimed to me?
I, too, loved to diagram sentences (maybe for the same reason the only math I ever liked was geometry) and lament the demise of the art in our schools, but it can get mighty tricky. And then there’s Chomsky….
Yes, ours was in the fourth grade too. Mrs. Stakem.
I remember a long lecture by a linguist lambasting early grammarians for imposing Latin ideas on their descriptions of English. His claim was that English simply lacks “case” just as we lack declensions. Our pronouns do seem to fall into cases, though, or at least to do something very similar. Still, people insist on using “I” where “me” would be proper and I figure in a few more years no one but an archaologist will know the difference.
Did someone say something about cake?
I believe we’ve already established that I ate the cake…
The cake is a lie.
You monster.