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 Mariner. I hated her.” Say it to most college students, and you get a blank look.
But not from the 24 students in Lucy Ferriss’s “Constructing Thought,” a half-credit course this spring in the English department here at Trinity College. They know how to diagram a sentence—and they are passionate about it.
Chattering excitedly, they gather in 102 McCook on a surprisingly sultry April evening for the course’s main event, a sentence-diagramming “slam.” Two teams will compete to see which one can, in 45 minutes, best diagram a 100-word sentence crafted by the other. This is their penultimate meeting; next week will be the final exam. Their lessons have been building toward the slam all semester.
A tall woman with a commanding voice, Ms. Ferriss, 55, is the reason these 19- to 21-year-olds are so excited about diagramming, a method of teaching English grammar that fell out of favor when she was still in middle school. Her boundless enthusiasm for the structure of sentences, along with her high standards, has infected her students with a zeal to get it right. When completed, the phrases and clauses assembled by her students will form intricate, branching diagrams along each blackboard, like a delta or a graceful, fallen larch.
She summons the teams to the two long blackboards and delivers instructions: She will call out the time after 15 minutes, and then every five. They may use their textbooks and dictionaries. Friends who have come to watch may offer them encouragement or heckle the other team, but they “can’t say, ‘No, that’s an adjective, not an adverb,’” Ms. Ferriss warns. “They will be wrong anyway.”
“OK, any questions?” she asks at 6:05 p.m. “Ready? One, two, three, go!” With a flourish, she hands out 24 copies of their task. For a moment all is quiet as the diagrammers read their sentences. Someone on Team A groans.
In this age of texting and Twittering, a course in sentence diagrams may seem like the fading dream of some elderly grammarian. But the idea for “Constructing Thought” came from Ms. Ferriss’s students. A novelist, literary scholar, and Trinity’s writer in residence, she was teaching a course on the short story three years ago. “I was trying to explain the beginning of a story, and I said, If I could diagram this for you, you would see what a subtle point it’s making.” After class, a few students asked her, “What’s this diagramming? We want to do it.”
“Believe me, you don’t,” she told them. “They burned all the books. They said it was bad for you.”
But they persisted, so Ms. Ferriss told them to bring three friends each, and she would offer a course. She hoped for six students; 44 signed up.
“I got very mean. I doubled the workload to scare people off.”
She taught the course in 2007 to the 30 students who stayed. What was the appeal? Not only have few of today’s college students learned diagramming; many never even studied grammar. Some of them learned to write with “invented spelling.” (You, dear reader, know those students.) What was the attraction of diagrams?
Ms. Ferriss has a theory: “They’ve begun to suspect that something is missing in their education. The teacher is writing ‘dangling participle’ in the margin, and they have not got a clue what it means.”
And whether her students are diagramming Henry James or an amendment to the Constitution, such rigorous exercises offer finite, ordered solutions that students find pleasing, she says. “It’s like a course in learning to play Scrabble. It is a game.”
“This is not a regular English class,” says Lorenzo Sewanan, a first-year student from New York City. “It’s logical, structured. It really showed order in the English language, and I loved it for that reason.”
Using Eugene R. Moutoux’s Diagramming Step by Step, students work their way through 24 lessons that build in complexity. Lesson 3, for example, deals with imperatives, vocatives (like “you,” in the sentence “You, dear reader, ... " above), contractions, and coordinating conjunctions. By Lesson 24, the students can diagram infinitives; gerunds; participles; adverb, adjective, elliptical, and noun clauses; compound-complex sentences; and adverbial objectives.
Then comes the fun. Lucy Ferriss asks the students to diagram 100 lines of a favorite poem, a speech, and rap lyrics. Mr. Sewanan, who majors in engineering, chose T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” He diagrammed 120 lines, more than a quarter of the poem. “Everyone should take this course,” he says. “It shows you how not boring English can be.”
Katie Marinello, a sophomore from Montville, N.J., and Team A’s captain, chose Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2006. Linda P. Gilbert, a fiction writer and Trinity’s associate registrar — who took the class because she “thought it would be fun” — diagrammed Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty, Like the Night.”
“I always liked that line,” she says. “I did two stanzas. And then I couldn’t stand it anymore. ... There were a lot of adverbial things, ‘whenever,’ ‘when,’ and I found myself looking in the dictionary to find out what part of speech is ‘thus’?”
Back in 102 McCook, the students at the slam are sweating, and not only because the temperature in the windowless room feels like 80 degrees. The supporters have drifted away.
“Fifteen minutes!” Lucy Ferriss announces.
Team A huddles over the particularly thorny sentence wickedly drafted in an hourlong meeting by Team B. From the huddle rises a cacophony of voices:
“I think we got it. Put it up there.”
... “Wait! Hey, hey, hey! She had a good point, she had a good point! ‘Crashing’ modifies ‘through.’”
“Yuh. He came through — through the window how? Crashing through. It’s modifying ‘through.’”
“So you’re modifying a preposition? Since when do prepositions have modifiers?”
“It doesn’t seem right. ... Shouldn’t there be another line of some sort?”
“This is the stuff I love,” says Ms. Ferriss.
Team B is calmly contemplating its blackboard, where an elegant diagram, about eight feet in length, stretches toward the back of the room.
“OK, everybody! Time is up right now!” says the professor at 6:50, to cheers and applause. Students take their seats for the judging, and Ms. Ferriss passes copies of the correct diagrams around the room.
“I have an invisible fellow judge,” she says, “named Eugene Moutoux.” She sent the sentences to the textbook author after she received them, 24 hours before the slam. “So it isn’t just my doing the judging.”
And so, to ooh’s and groans (“Never again.”) and occasional arguments (“There is a line there, it’s just really faint”; “C’mon,” Ms. Ferriss says, “it’s erased!”), the professor swoops in on the students’ diagrams, nailing misplaced modifiers and erroneously labeled gerunds. “If somebody comes running, somebody comes crashing, somebody comes anything, it is a ... ?”
“Participle,” says someone sadly.
Applause from Team B, whose members are happily totting up Team A’s errors.
Team B, which craftily wrote its sentence by meeting in the library, takes home the prize, Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, with 65 points out of 100 for its diagram and a spelling error (see if you can find it in the box below) in its sentence. Team A, which wrote its sentence via e-mail on the day it was due, gets 35.
In the end, the scores won’t matter. Ms. Ferriss will grade only for participation in the slam. She is looking ahead to the final. If only she could find that sentence she was assigned in seventh grade from Silas Marner, the one she diagrammed perfectly across seven blackboards. She was so proud of that.
NAIL THAT ADVERB!
For the culminating event in a course at Trinity College, in Connecticut, each of two teams has 45 minutes in which to diagram a sentence written by the other team. Each team begins with 100 points and loses points for errors in its diagram, such as a verbal noun construed as a gerund rather than a participle, and for grammar or spelling mistakes in the sentence it wrote for the other team. (View the correct diagrams.)
Team A’s sentence, written by Team B:
It was five minutes until midnight on the eve of May 13th, Lucy’s birthday, and her friends were in the act of frantically shopping for and fervently buying balloons filled with helium, streamers as long as the Mississippi river, and those poppers that parents are known for getting for their children for New Year’s Eve, when, back home, Spiderman, swinging from building to building, shooting webs with reckless abandon, came crashing through the window of Lucy’s house to abscond with the chocolate cake waiting to be consumed by the partygoers if and when they ever arrived.
Team B’s sentence, written by Team A:
Keeping his feet light on the soft tar, like a hungry wolf running after a lone deer through the wooded hills, the runner leapt over the hurdles and passed his opponents in the lanes next to him, his arms pumping back and forth, until it seemed he would surely be first in the second leg of the relay and, as the crowd cheered his imminent win, a smile grew across his face and he leaned forward across the finish line, slowly extending his damaged hand, wound with a bandage, to tag his teammate whose feet were dancing on the track.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 36, Page A10
