Eugene, the Master of Diagrams
I just wanted to add a plug for this guy, Eugene R. Moutoux, whom I’ve never met, but who is probably the undisputed master of diagrams.
Sentence diagramming went out of style long ago, but it’s unfortunate that it did so. Who knows why it got such bad press, anyway? Too many ruler-wielding teachers out there? Possibly, but I suspect that it went out of style (like so much in education) because it wasn’t about students expressing their feelings… – not that that’s the end of the world, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of education, either. It also required many teachers to know grammar at a fairly intensive level, and to have a true love for the way grammar works to shape the sentence. Authors’ sentences have different shapes — a Hemingway sentence is all straight lines, main clauses, few modifiers; a Poe sentence looks like an angel’s wing.
Diagramming works. Almost nothing teaches sentence structure — that is, the architecture of a sentence, the way that all the parts hang together and relate to one another — better than traditional diagramming. How unfortunate, in this age of technology, that diagramming, the HTML of language structure, is being lost.
Crucial for classical education too, diagramming teaches analysis, the fine art of breaking something into parts and classifying them. It teaches how one idea is subordinate to another idea, how underlying structures can be identical despite outward differences in appearance: in that sense, diagramming teaches a kind of ethics.
Eugene Moutoux clearly enjoys diagramming for its ability to teach sentence structure, but also for its own sake, the way some people enjoy crosswords or Sudoku. For example, check out the first sentence of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby or the delightfully confessional — even chatty — opening sentence of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.
Clearly, these are diagrammed not just to demonstrate diagramming, but mostly for the love of the game.
Anyway, before diagramming becomes an entirely lost art, I thought I’d pass on the resource to any and all who want to partake of language at the structural level and revel in the shape of a sentence.
I teach it to my juniors every year, and to those unfortunate souls who wind up in my summer school class.
Because the efficacy of the process isn’t evident in the time it takes to click a mouse, they bitch like crazy. Most of these kids barely know an adverb from an adjective, let alone how clauses fit together. Once they drink the Kool-Ade or have success with it however, they begin to see how their reading comprehension and writing skills take off.
notesfromthewilderness.blogspot.com
You have to bitchslap them into though–that’s the trade-off.
I too am a fan of Eugene Moutoux; however, I an unable to contact him by email in order to order some of his publications. My emails to him (ermoutoux@juno.com) are returned “not an authorized user.” Can anyone help?