I remember diagramming ... but another thing I've found that helped me with constructing sentences was studying other languages, especially German. And then there was college, where all freshmen were required to take a class in which they'd have to turn in a two-page paper ever week. Univerally loathed, but it sure did teach you how to write competently, if not well.
Summer reading - every summer we'd spend a week or two at the beach and we'd pack a big bag of books. One almost ritual was rereading the entire Hobbit/Lord of the Rings cycle every year.
I am pretty sure I once spent a summer learning how to diagram sentences from my neighbor's schoolbook that was published in 1911. I actually love that book- she shared it with her brother, and both their names were written in it. It has a blue gingham cover sewed on it, and there was still homework tucked in it!
I love diagramming, but never learned it in school.
I love diagramming sentences. It makes English mathy!
I'm hoping some of the fiction trends are running themselves into the ground. I was on a site and saw an ad for a book that starts off with "werewolf terrorists" and "a warlock cop". um, er, I don't think it's comedy
And, continuing the trend that started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - and continued with Jane Eyre, Little Women, Sense and Sensibility, Abraham Linkcoln and Queen Victoria as vampire/demon slayers, and Shakespeare Undead - someone has done one on Tom Sawyer; can't remember if it was zombies, vampires, or what.
I also saw
The Meowmorphosis,
in which the narrator wakes up as a kitten.
What Jessica said! I remember reading in some education journal that grammar and math use the same part of the brain, and I thought, "Well, duh."
But I've never been able to convince either mathy types nor wordy types of that.
Edited. DYAC.
That makes sense but I can see why people would be hard to convince. Grammar feels like it comes naturally to me whereas I have to work at math. I can't look at an equation and tell something is wrong (even if I'm not sure what it is) the way I can with a sentence.
I love diagramming sentences. It makes English mathy!
And it makes it visual. It's not a great skill to teach kids in a world of limited time/maximum testing though.
Speaking of which, my students, age 17 and 18 (and occasionally 19 and one is 20) are having a problem with sentence boundaries. Fully 90% of errors are sentence boundaries. How the hell do I teach that crap?
