How many of you remember diagramming sentences in elementary school? Where you shuffled, with great trepidation, to the chalkboard to draw a straight line and bisect it to show the “subject” (noun) and “predicate” (verb). And then the diagonal line(s) underneath one or more of those words to show “modifiers.”
I have to make a confession—I liked diagramming. Although some have likened it to a mathematical equation, I see it more as putting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle (I’m not mathematically inclined, but I do like puzzles).
It is easy enough to figure out “The horse galloped” or “The cat hissed.” But what about “John’s horse galloped around the paddock and then ran into the woods.” Oh my. Now you’re getting into lines underneath the lines beneath the subject/predicate line. And where does “around the paddock” go? OK, maybe that’s easy enough (under the verb galloped seems logical). But where does the rest of it go? And why do we care? Do we need to know how an airplane is designed before we fly? Do we need to know the terms and parts of a sentence before we write?
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Writers On The Move: Diagramming for Grammar
Join Marsha Cook and V S Grenier on September 7- 10AM PST 11AM EST NOON PST 1PM EST as they welcome Barbara Rogan. Barbara has had an incedible career and she is still doing so many things to help writers. This is going to be a great show that will be both entertaing and very informative. BARBARA began her publishing career with Fawcett Books before moving to Israel. One year later she established the Barbara Rogan Literary Agency, which specialized in representing American and European publishers and agents for Hebrew-language rights. With a few years the agency had become the largest in the country, supplying over 60% of the large Israeli market for translated books. During this period Barbara served on the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem Book Fair. Her first novel, Changing States , was published simultaneously in England, the U.S., and Israel. Shortly after its publication, she sold the literary agency and returned to New York. Since then she’s pub...
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