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.

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 ...

A lot of artists have used words in paintings in recent years, but the way Libby Wadsworth uses them is markedly different. She presents words on sentence diagrams that give the words visual structure ...

In her small classroom at Gaithersburg High School, English teacher Robyn Jackson draws a complicated pattern of horizontal and diagonal lines on the blackboard. Her students bend over their notebooks ...

Say “sentence diagramming” to people of a certain age, and you get reactions ranging from, “Oh, I was really good at that in eighth grade,” to “Mrs. Green made us diagram The Rime of the Ancient ...

KENNEWICK – Patricia Ello drew what looked like a tree of words on a blank sheet of notebook paper. The eighth-grader at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Kennewick put a sentence’s subject, ...

I don’t know why the Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch diagrammed part of a sentence in one of his legal opinions. Following the Reed-Kellogg norms that Mark Liberman of Language Log once ...

Ever wondered what makes action movies — often cheesy and grandiose — timeless favorites? Aside from the weapons and explosions, dialogue probably plays a larger role than most think. And like books, ...

The Dori Monson Show is on KIRO Newsradio (weekdays Noon-3). Dori needs some help from any listeners who are English majors and grammar enthusiasts. Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien recently ...