Curriculum Planning and Alignment
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Annotated Bibliography - History of Diagramming I am exploring the controversy surrounding teaching sentence diagraming in school. It is my opinion that diagraming is a crucial skill for students to learn and assists them in becoming better writers. This argument is documented at least as far back as the 1950s and is polarizing at best, with strong opinions on both sides. I teach at a small charter classical academy in North Texas where grammar and sentence diagramming are introduced early in lower school and enthusiastically embraced throughout the remainder of a student's years at the school. Studying grammar is studying the building blocks of our language. The ability to diagram sentences allows students to break down grammar into the most simplified form, gaining understanding as both a reader and a writer. ...
To Tree or Not to Tree
Speaking on the subject of grammar, 17th century poet and literary critic John Dryden said: “Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows where noun, and verb, and participle grows” (Dryden). In this statement, Dryden accurately and succinctly established the importance of phrase structure rules and syntactic diagrams. Learning phrase structure rules and how to use syntactic diagrams is crucial to developing a solid understanding of grammar. If you want to do something well, you must understand the process from its inception. To write well, learning the crucial building blocks of grammar will help focus on “the well-formedness of sentences'' (Cruzan and Adams 193). Syntactic diagrams, such as the Reed-Kellogg Diagram and the newer and seemingly less cumbersome Tree Diagram allow writers to identify issues in sentences and phrases by breaking them down into smaller chunks or constituents, and also by understanding how those constituents depend an...