There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. The ...

I read an article last month about the lost art of diagramming sentences, a once-required skill that many American children had to master if they wanted to pass English back in the mid-20th century.

When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a ...