I asked her to show me, and for an example she used the first sentence she recalls diagramming: "The dog barked." "By drawing a line and writing 'dog' on the left side of the line and 'barked' on ...

For a long time, sentence diagramming flourished throughout the American school system, and, despite being condemned as a useless waste of time in the 1970s, it still persists in many schools ...