Sentence diagramming is the long division of English. It involves a bewildering array of lines and diagonal branches. It is loathed as an elementary school chore. And it is presumed to be obsolete.

D.F. (Dave) Oliveria joined The Spokesman-Review in 1984. He currently is a columnist and compiles the Huckleberries Online blog and writes about North Idaho in his Huckleberries column.

Sentence diagramming was once a widespread technique for teaching kids how to analyze the structure of a sentence. If you had to do it in school, you either loved it or you hated it. Most kids hated ...

The writer Stephen King pushes people who want to write well to "read, read, read." Reading a wide variety of writing can feel like riding waves of language: words, sentences, paragraphs — all of ...

The recently revised Standards of Learning of the Commonwealth of Virginia consider sentence diagramming an “essential skill” and mandate that it be taught in grades 6-8. Frankly, if English teachers ...

When we first learned how to diagram sentences back in middle school, it was a total pain in the ass. The exercise was complicated and seemingly superfluous. How useful was scrawling a preposition on ...