In grade school, the good nuns built a solid foundation for good writing through two important benchmarks: (1) Parts of Speech; and (2) Sentence Diagraming. They identified the bones of the sentence and interaction of words, within a graphic setting to learn them.

The eight Parts of Speech comprise: Noun, Pronoun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Prepositions, Conjunction and Interjection. I accepted the first seven without question, but never understood why grammarians included the Interjection, as it only expresses emotion, usually followed by an exclamation point, and has no grammatical relation to the rest of the sentence. Nevertheless, an Interjection remained a Part of Speech, while the erudite grammarians omitted an essential Part of Speech; namely, the Articles: “a” and “the”, also known as Determiners, which comprise the most often used sentence words, particularly by children.

Sentence Diagrams started as an early exercise to identify and place the Parts of Speech. At first, it was easy because early childhood sentences contained few words, mostly nouns and verbs. I recall liking the process, which seemed more like solving a puzzle than doing work. The initial diagram comprised a horizontal line divided by a vertical line. The student wrote the sentence subject, always a noun or pronoun, on the left; the predicate, always a verb on the right.  As sentence length expanded, the diagram added a second vertical line, to the right of the predicate, to accommodate the direct object or a predicate adjective., completing the main skeleton of the sentence.

In addition to identifying the Parts of Speech, diagramming taught us where to fit the modifiers. Every other Part of Speech, except for the vagabond, Interjection, modified the subject, predicate or direct object. Adjectives always modified a noun; adverbs usually modified the verb, but could also modify another adverb or an adjective. Though an Adjective only modifies a noun or pronoun, an adverb may modify another adjective, a common source of mis-identification. Nevertheless, with five of the Parts of Speech placed, only Prepositions, Conjunctions, and the lowly Articles remained.

As in all things, the sentence diagraming process became more complicated with the addition of words and the introduction to Passive Voice, which moved sentence action in the opposite direction.  Nevertheless, sentence diagraming fostered clear, concise writing.  No one wished to diagram a wordy line.