I promise not to found a new religion over my belief, however.
Here's an excerpt from one post:
A visit to any grocery store will reveal just how poorly people have been taught their native language. Signs will say, "Orange's" and "Apple's". Signs will confuse "two," "too," and "to," etc.
Admittedly, I am a dinosaur. I attended excellent public schools on Long Island in the 1960s-1970s. I will always remember diagramming sentences; I have never known ANYONE else who was required to do that. Indeed, no one even knows what I am talking about.
Here's another excerpt from another post:
Below are several responses I received from readers.
James B. Morris writes:
This is not a new problem. When I was in high school (in the late '70s) I went through the honors program for four years straight. We never read a single Dickens book, no Melville, or Milton. None were required. We read only one Shakespeare play (Romeo+Juliet of course).. . .
Instead we were pummeled with insipid and self-absorbed junk like Rabbit Run and Catcher in the Rye.
My cousin still brags that he made it all the way through twelve years of schooling and two years of community college without ever having to read a single book cover-to-cover.
. . . Diagramming sentences! I wonder how many education schools insist that prospective English teachers learn how to diagram sentences and the importance of teaching their students how to do it? I'd wager that in nearly every ed school, if someone suggested that, he'd be hooted at as a backward-looking rube who doesn't understand that we no longer use such mechanistic and creativity-suppressing tools as sentence diagramming any more.
43 Comments •
Comments:
Perhaps I did have to diagram sentences at some time in my life. I think I had to suffer this oppression, but we all tend to block traumatic experiences from our minds. In any case, I couldn’t do it now on a bet. Far more important than being able to diagram sentences is to read the work of good writers. This has two salutory impacts:
1. You tend to model your writing after those you read.
2. You learn enough to have something to say when you write.
I used to visit eighth-grade classrooms to prosletyze the students for Engineering. One of the things I would tell them was the courses they should take in HS to make this possible. At the top of the list was always English. “Engineers must be able to communicate” I would say, and then I would add “And I mean real English courses where you read long hard books that have no pictures and are written by good writers.” (It was always fun to watch teachers react to that statement.) But the message I was providing was fundamental. To write well, you must read well. It doesn’t come from mechanistic repetition.
Personally, I think diagramming sentences is a waste of valuable time that could be more profitably spent learning differential equations, or multi-dimensional calculus. But that’s just me.
carl
who is plesantly surprised that SF has been free of Australian Open threads these past few days.