There’s a fun off-and-on discussion on diagramming sentences over on the Phi Beta Cons blog at NRO [just do a “find” on “diagram.”  For the record my vote is “yes.”  It was an incredibly useful exercise for me, rather like doing scales and arpeggios for 10 minutes of your initial practice.  It helps kids—even if unconsciously—dig in to the structure and substructures of sentences.  And learning backwards and forwards the various structures and substructures of sentences gives one mastery over those sentences. 

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.