Steven Karlson at Cold Spring Shops – the best blog in the business that is simultaneously about economics and railroads (on a totally geeky level – as if Sheila O’Malley got onto a jag of reading about locomotives and rolling stock) notes a book lamenting the dying art of diagramming sentences:

 Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Digramming Sentences, the direct object of Book Review N^o. 19, makes that case. Perhaps it’s a lost art in part because the main title parses as DOG \ SISTER BERNADETTE’S \ BARKING. Author Kitty Burns Flory enjoyed showing off her skills to Sister Bernadette. She also demonstrated other methods of modelling sentence structure, some of which were less intuitive than the manual according to Sister Bernadette and John E. Warriner. A passage that refers to a model called a tree diagram notes (p. 138)

These are considered more complete and, according to a friend of mine who teaches them, easier: traditional diagrams not only distort the original word order of a sentence, but, as I’ve mentioned, can also be insanely complex even when they’re dealing with a relatively ordinary sentence.

Never mind some of the constructions of poets and novelist, see chapter 4. And perhaps the method does not help distinguish sensible from incoherent writing. Quickly: diagram “Farmer Bill Dies in House.” (See p. 61). If it did, perhaps we could ask Congress to use a diagramming method as part of crafting legislation. Try this.

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Does that prepositional phrase “in restraint of trade or commerce” attach to “conspiracy” or to all three of “contract, combination, conspiracy”? Would the Supreme Court have an easier time discerning the Intent Of Congress with sentence diagrams in the Congressional Record?

Dunno, but the whole Heller case could be settled with a pretty simple diagramming of the text of the Second Amendment.

But I digress. 

Back in college I – as the most-identifiable English major in my senior class, a writing tutor, and the editor of the college paper – was approached on cold January evening by a group of Business majors who were struggling with their BizLaw class (the “Physical Chemistry” of the business degree, the rocks on which many a Biz career were dashed).

“Mitch?”  What does this sentence…“, they said, pointing to a two-column-inch swath of text highlighted in yellow in their Business Law textbook – the most-accepted undergrad BizLaw textbook in the country at the time “…mean?”

And I sat for half an hour, attempting to diagram it several different ways…

…before realizing – and confirming my friends’ suspicions – that the sentence/paragraph literally meant nothing. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.