The English Sentence Up Close

Book excerpt: The enlightened notion of displaying the decomposed elements of a sentence pictorially has had a long history in the U.S. The pedagogical idea was developed by Stephen Watkins Clark in his 1847 book with the mouthful-of-a-title A Practical Grammar: In Which Words, Phrases & Sentences are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relationships to Each Another - a true sentence diagramming challenge! Clark's scheme of deploying the parts of a sentence into stacked and adjacent cartoon-like balloons or bubbles was improved upon in Higher Lessons in English Grammar, (first edition 1877) by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Their "geometry of grammar" - as it has been called - is predicated on the idea that students would better learn how to structure sentences if they could see them drawn as linear graphic structures.