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plblair

Breaking Rules

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plblair
, June 29th, 2010 at 07:57 AM (450 Views)
Is diagramming sentences still done in English classes these days? I hated those sessions. Tedious! Noun or pronoun goes here, verb goes there, adverbs and adjectives ... and I wanted to get on to the fun stuff: reading and, more important, writing.
But more decades than I care to count later, I realize how lucky I was to have that experience. I learned from it. How much I learned from it was made clear to me a while back when I taught a writing class for adults, and made reference to "adjectives." One of the students in all seriousness asked, "What's an adjective?"
Huh? You don't know that stuff?
How can you break the rules if you don't know what the rules are? I break the rules constantly when I write. My literary landscape is peppered with incomplete sentences, dangling participles, nouns and verbs implied. Few adverbs, fewer adjectives.
But I do it deliberately. For effect. And I know what rules I'm violating. Which isn't to imply that you have to know the rules before you break them - but it makes the process more fun.

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  1. Jon Sprunk's Avatar
    I was never much of a student back in high school, but I'm grateful for the lessons I received in basic English grammar/composition. Writing is one of those things that the more you learn, the more you realize you're just scratching the surface. Having a good foundation can help a lot.
  2. 's Avatar
    I always enjoyed diagramming sentences when I was in school. It's one of the few things I still remember how to do.
    I also used to use my spelling lists to create one sentence stories. Aw! Those were the days.
  3. expatrie's Avatar
    I don't recall diagramming sentences but I heard my da complain about them.

    I got enough grammar in French, (I claim fluency and lived there for 10 months without being shot at...although when I first landed I got mistaken for German, to the point I had to learn enough German to say "Nicht sprecken-zie Deutch, Sprecken-zie Frantsuzich unt English." And I don't know how to spell those, so sorry. It's my own little Bela Lugosi moment.) and if you're serious about grammar, take a foreign language. You learn another language as a side effect, which has a certain je ne sais quoi, and you have to redo all that grammar stuff you didn't much pay attention to because you're expected to understand infinitives and all the other stuff like pronoun antecedents, the plieonastic ne, and subjunctive past and so on in order to speak properly.

    Now if only I could get people to use the subjunctive in English. Oh, how I wish I were able to make them use it.

    As to dangling participles, I can't understand sentences written that way and have to reformat them into "correct" to even understand them. So you're not going to win points with me that way. But I have to reformat a lot of sentences. Like when people call an SUV a car. It's not a car. It's a vehicle, but it's not a car. A Porsche is a car. Well, unless it's a cayenne, that's an SUV!

    Yes, I can be overly literal. I know.

    But I survived The Shipping News. Which is "home of the sentence fragment, over a million served." And now I'm attempting The Mirrored Heavens, which is like land of no-sentence length variety. Both were time-consuming reads. I like the occasional frag, but in excess they wear on me. Consume in measured doses.