Lori Falce: Diagramming, commas and politics

You know the way at school there are belongings you study that appear totally pointless and with no influence in your actual life? Like how most individuals won’t ever must know something in regards to the Battle of Hastings. Or how most adults will agree they by no means used a quadratic equation after their final algebra check.

But then there are the belongings you study that turn into background programming. You may not notice that they’re there, serving to you navigate the world, however they’re so entrenched in what you might be doing that you simply don’t notice you might be utilizing them day by day.

In the previous two weeks, I’ve had no fewer than six conversations with irate individuals who made me notice I had a type of core hard-drive working techniques — and that lots of people don’t.

In sixth grade, Sister Winifred spent lots of time educating us to diagram sentences. It’s the type of factor many faculties have let fall by the wayside with cursive writing. But it clearly wants a comeback.

Diagramming permits you to do greater than learn a sentence. It permits you to perceive it on a schematic stage, the best way an architect or a contractor reads a blueprint. It forces you to contemplate how this phrase modifies that phrase. It makes you establish the antecedents of pronouns. It offers you actual appreciation for the position of a comma.

A blueprint permits you to discover the load-bearing beams. Understanding diagramming permits you to do the identical with the essential components of somebody’s speech or writing. And like doing math in your head after you’ve turn into fluent in numbers, after you grasp diagramming, you don’t want a chalkboard to work out which prepositional phrase goes the place.

I’m incessantly confronted with readers or letter-writers who’re incensed over an announcement made by an official or by an article written by a reporter that has nothing to do with what was mentioned or typed.

Likewise, many a candidate or elected official has created a furor due to a misplaced modifier or dangling participle.

Perhaps this smacks of me being the dreaded grammar Nazi. It shouldn’t. I imply, I’m precisely the one who will right your spelling in a social media put up or silently red-pen folks — like my sister — in the midst of a drawn-out story. But that doesn’t imply I’m fallacious.

How many Facebook wars or Twitter battles could possibly be resolved if extra folks understood dangling modifiers or Oxford commas? How many instances does a failure to grasp what somebody is saying result in simply throwing the child out with the misunderstood bathwater?

Over the years, I usually have decried the poor state of civics schooling in America. I’ve mentioned excessive colleges ought to completely put together folks to vote by main as much as the age of 18 with a greater understanding of not solely federal authorities however extra grassroots details about how issues work in their very own states, counties and municipalities.

But I’m more and more being swayed towards a return to probably the most primary structure of communication. I feel diagramming must see a renaissance.

And I feel Sister Winifred would agree with me.