Comments on: Diagramming the Preamble to the US Constitution.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

They need to make a t-shirt out of this! I know a lot of English/History nerds (like myself) who would totally wear it.

By: datsuzoku

datsuzoku — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

When read from left to right, this sounds like Miss Teen South Carolina’s infamous ‘such as, the Iraq’ address.

By: Nix

Nix — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never seen this done in the UK (probably because the UK’s English grammar teaching is basically nonexistent). It strikes me as notably ugly and unpleasant compared to a simple annotated parse tree, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m not sure what the point is of English grammar teaching at sub-university level anyway: native speakers handle it automatically, everyone else of lower-school age picks it up from the native speakers pretty effectively, and the ‘grammar’ they teach in most schools is so inaccurate as to be worthless (no, `the’ is not an adjective).

Just hit them over the head with the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I say. :)

By: mannakiosk

mannakiosk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Never heard of this kind of diagramming. Do they do this in all English-speaking coutries? Do other languages have this kind of thing?

By: Tommy

Tommy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We need to modify that diagram to conform with God’s standards.

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A want a T-shirt with that on it.

By: jahknow

jahknow — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We need to modify that diagram to conform with the new Global War On Terror guidelines.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was thinking the same thing, steaming pile.

By: Moon

Moon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are no diagramming geeks here to say “This is all wrong!”???

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to have the entire constitution diagramed like this on a handkerchief so I could rub peoples’ noses in it.

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

you’d be arrested for blasphemy

By: Moon

Moon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Where is the “and assault weapons for EVERYBODY” clause?

By: OM

OM — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

…Some entreprenurial individual needs to do a version of this on parchment, then do a sequel with the Declaration of Independence!

By: Khonsu

Khonsu — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Awesome. I used to love doing this in my spare time during class. >__>;

By: hlsamples

hlsamples — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lovely essay, originally printed in Harper’s and now collected in the 2005 Best American, called “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog”. It’s all about the pleasures of sentence diagramming (images included). The writer, Kitty Burns Florey, later published a slim book expanding it: http://tinyurl.com/376j8e