importance of diagramming?

[petertohen]

My 13 year old asked me this and honestly, I don't have an answer. *I* love to diagram and think it's fun to break the sentence apart, but he sees no need. And for him, there probably isn't a need. He's not going into writing for a career and probably not even going to college. But if someone can give me a really good reason and purpose, I'd love to hear it.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-impor ... -sentences

[annaz]

I used to ask myself this regularly until I found the true value of it in the book, The Well Trained Mind. I'm not a classical educator by any means, but it's explained well in this book, so I can only quote tidbits here that I wish I'd have known way back:

"It reveals the logic of the sentence structure" - I found to be true. We actually use it for creating good sentences and finding what is wrong with a sentence dd wrote. It if doesn't make sense, we diagram it and find where her error in structure lies - we use that tactic often.

"It's a visual of the rules" - I use it as a puzzle of the rules. Once you get to adjectives that appear to be nouns; the difficult parts of speech, it provides a great visual of understanding. I can actually read a diagram and then write the sentence. If the diagram is wrong, the sentence makes no sense and vice versa.

Simply labeling the parts of speech doesn't really teach the relationship between words and phrases. It becomes very logical when you can actually see the relationship through diagramming and makes obvious why the structure is wrong.

I find that diagramming was much more useful the further we got in grammar in context of writing better sentences. It was a way to check our errors.

HTH,
Ann

[my3sons]

Outstanding answer, Ann! Thanks for sharing! I find it helps draw attention to writing consistently using varied sentence structures, especially as diagramming exercises often lead into correlating writing assignments. Of course, I didn't see this 'fruit' until our sons were older, and their writing was more developed. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie