In the fall of 1964, the Johnson–Goldwater campaign was in full swing and Vietnam just a cloud on the horizon. I arrived at Eastview Junior High in Richfield, Ohio, each morning on a big yellow school bus. My language-arts teacher always made a more stylish arrival, pulling into the teachers' parking lot in his gleaming, silver-blue Corvette Stingray. Seventh-graders were supposed to call him Mr. Richards, but he referred to himself by his initials, JMR, and so did we.
JMR's language-arts class, in contrast to his flashy car, was all about fundamentals. His trademark was a notebook that we kept throughout the year and into which we laboriously copied rules of grammar, cases of pronouns and tenses of verbs. "How's your notebook coming?" was his usual query—an interrogative sentence, as we soon learned.
But merely writing a sentence wasn't good enough for JMR. We had to diagram each example, showing the use of each word. I would draw a horizontal line, divide it in half with a shorter vertical line, put the subject of the sentence on the left, the predicate on the right, and then add lines to the diagram for the remaining words—like the limbs of a growing tree.
‘The lessons of sentence diagramming not only keep writing focused, they lend a balanced flow to prose.’
At first, the tree was quite simple: "Bill laughed"—a simple sentence with a simple subject and simple predicate. But by Christmas break, JMR had introduced us to direct objects, indirect objects and compound this and thats. Simple sentences gave way to complex sentences with subordinate conjunctions, prepositional phrases and a participle or two thrown in for good measure.
Diagramming illuminates how a word is used and tells a writer where it fits in the architecture of a sentence. With a properly diagrammed sentence, the choice of an objective-case pronoun for an indirect object (that would be "whom" rather than "who") becomes clear. It directs you to the singular verb that agrees with your singular subject. And if a particular adverb is indeed modifying the predicate, why is it three prepositional phrases away, dangling there?
Diagrams graphically highlight the building blocks of solid sentence construction. They show that the seemingly arcane rules of correctness actually are essential to graceful writing. The lessons of diagramming not only keep writing focused and comprehensible; they lend a balanced flow to prose, whether you're crafting an op-ed piece or a mystery novel.
I still diagram sentences, albeit mentally, as I edit my own writing. Far from being an exercise in drudgery, the reshuffling of a sentence's parts is much easier with a computer's cutting and pasting than it ever was in JMR's classroom. With rules of grammar and usage at my command, I can quickly reposition errant prepositional phrases, retrieve dangling participles and avoid splitting all but the most deserving of infinitives.
I doubt that diagramming is taught much today, but we need it now more than ever before. Rushed emails and abbreviated text messages positively discourage precise writing, which probably helps to explain why so many college students stumble when required to put coherent thoughts on paper. But never fear: Learning or regaining the basics of diagramming is only a click away on a number of helpful websites.
A sentence diagram is a map to clarity of prose. It organizes the building blocks of sound writing, much as a blueprint guides the construction of a house.
That's what I learned from JMR almost 50 years ago, and it has served me well ever since. I just wonder if he still has that beautiful Corvette.
Corrections & Amplifications
The illustration accompanying this article was derived from the first edition of the book "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog," and showed an incorrect diagram of a sentence. In the sentence beginning, "We learned to 'diagram' sentences," the phrase "to 'diagram' sentences" functions as a direct object, not as an adverbial infinitive phrase as indicated in the diagram, and the rest of the sentence modifies the verb "to diagram," not the verb "learned." The error was corrected in the second edition of the book.
—The most recent of Mr. Borneman's many books is "Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad."