Sentence diagramming is a valuable tool to help students visually represent the structures of sentences. It’s true that it is not essential. There are many people who comprehend the deep structures of the English language that do not know how to diagram, but everyone who understands diagramming understands basic grammar.

However, one road that I’ve crossed in my instruction is how to grade diagrams. Often time students understand the grammar, but they forget the diagramming technique.  As a teacher, I had to ask myself whether to deduct points for small mistakes.  The conclusion that I’ve reached is that when presenting tests containing diagrams, I should allow my students to utilize a reference guide that reminds them of the sentence diagramming forms.  This allows me to use diagramming as a way to determine if the students are understanding grammar, and I don’t have to deduct points for mistakes in diagramming technique.

This chart uses the Reed-Kellogg system.

I’ve created a basic sentence diagramming chart. In the coming weeks, I’ll make one for advanced concepts.

I’ve uploaded the chart in both OpenOffice.org 3.0 and PDF formats. Feel free to modify and distribute this material.

Basic Sentence Diagramming Chart (PDF)

Basic Sentence Diagramming Chart (OpenOffice.org 3.0)

As an English teacher, I spend hours each month smacking my hand against my head as I see grammatical errors made in school publications and student work. Many of these errors are small and would be prevented with just a little more instruction or attention to detail.

Earlier this year, it was my privilege to attend a class conducted by Simon James Sharp, a textbook editor for Macmillan Publishing.  He claimed that professionals in the publishing industry face the same problems that English teachers face, inconsistent and erroneous writing.

Simon Sharp revealed that one small step publishers take to help this problem is to create an in-house editorial style guide. A style guide provides a quick reference for expectations concerning punctuation, grammar, and document formatting. Just as teachers might not comb through a grammar textbook each time they send parent correspondence, it is doubtful that professional authors and academics will look through a five-hundred page Chicago Manual of Style. However, both groups might look through a ten page quick reference sheet.

In order to help remedy the problem of erroneous writing in Christian schools, I’ve created a simple style guide that will help educators review stylistic expectations for professional writing.  Ideally, such a reference would be consulted when students complete work, teachers create assignments, and administrators send memos.  If the entire school is making a concerted effort to create consistent professional correspondence, it will inevitably filter down to increased student achievement in language arts.

Before going further, I should note what specifically makes this a Christian document. First, many of the rules contained in it are from the Grammar and Composition series, one of the most used textbook collections in Christian schools. Second, it contains sections on using spiritual language.

I’ve uploaded three versions of my hand-dandy little guide.I recommend downloading the PDF version unless you intend to make changes. Feel free to download the OpenOffice or Word formats and edit it before distributing it to your particular organization. It has a Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution, noncommercial, share-alike license; and I enjoy it when people use my material.

Style Guide for Christian Schools (PDF)

Style Guide for Christian Schools (OpenOffice Format)

Style Guide for Christian Schools (Office XP)

]]> http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/06/style-guide-for-christian-schools/feed/ 0 http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/05/american-vs-british-spelling/ http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/05/american-vs-british-spelling/#comments Mon, 25 May 2009 11:00:01 +0000 cullenhartley http://www.cullenhartley.com/?p=473

At the school where I teach, one of the reoccurring questions in the English department is whether a teacher should deduct points when students use British spelling in essays. For me, the answer is absolutely not! Students in international schools are shuffled from school to school and system to system; it is wrong to penalize students for doing what they’ve been taught.

As a teacher, I do sometimes have difficulty remembering the differences between British and American spelling. In a red-eyed marathon though a stack of essays, I have accidentally deducted points for students that use an opposite-side-of-the-Atlantic spelling technique.

Recently I came across a fantastic chart by Susan Jones that outlines the differences between American and British spelling. I asked the site administrator, Georgia State University Professor H. Patricia Byrd, for permission to adapt the chart to my website. She responded, “Of course.”

Perhaps this will help me make fewer mistakes. I hope that it helps other English teachers as well.

I’ve uploaded the chart in both Word 2007 and PDF versions.

American vs. British Spelling (Word 2007)

American vs. British Spelling (PDF)

If students would read and apply the lessons found in Elements of Style, we English teachers would be out of a job.  Written in 1918 by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr., this tiny volume provides concise solutions for common language errors.

Do you ever wonder how to use apostrophes?  It is the first lesson in the book.  Do you ever wonder when to put a comma before and?  The answer is there. Did you forget your high school teacher’s lesson on semi-colons?  Refresh yourself.

Read the full text of this out-of-copyright book on Bartleby.com

Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. @ Bartleby.com

Hard copy lovers can purchase Elements of Style through my Amazon Affiliates link.

]]> http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/05/elements-of-style/feed/ 0 http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/04/grammar-for-teachers/ http://www.cullenhartley.com/2009/04/grammar-for-teachers/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:04:03 +0000 cullenhartley http://www.cullenhartley.com/?p=223 Grammar for Teachers helped solidify in my mind the necessary place of grammar in the classroom.]]>

Few books thrown from a throwaway pile ever make a pervasive change in my thinking, Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions by Constance Weaver is an exception.

Rescued from the trash bin when I noticed one of my university professors throwing it away, this book helped solidify in my mind the necessary place of grammar in the classroom. The necessary, essential, undebatable role of grammar that Constance elaborates upon in her volume is that language grammar and mechanics knowledge must be thoroughly embedded and understood in the mind of the teacher.

The first chapter of Weaver’s pea green volume elaborates on the psycholinguistic nature of grammar and implies that in a perfect world teachers could just teach the language rules and be finished with the lesson.  Yet the unfortunate reality that Weaver embraces is that not all children will learn these rules, even with a teacher’s best efforts.  Developmental, cultural, and attitudinal barriers militantly guard the way.  Her solution is for teachers to provide both structured and unstructured opportunities for students to manipulate and create language and to intuitively learn that unclear, ungrammatical writing is inherently inferior to properly written prose. However, the only chance for teachers to provide these learning opportunities is if they already have a thorough understanding of grammar.

Weaver continues by explaining how grammatical structures and morphemes are combined in increasingly sophisticated sentences and thoughts as brains learn and mature. The meat of her book explains specific examples about how teachers can integrate grammar instruction into reading and writing lessons without the requirement of teaching specific rules. Her most compelling call during this section of the test is her plea for properly facilitated sentence combining activities. The final chapters explain the essentials that teachers should know about traditional grammar, the content that has traditionally been taught in primary and secondary schools, and structural grammar, the methods that modern-day linguists use in their field of research.

It is true that some of Weaver’s claims will come across as radical, especially her contention that punctuation, agreement, and other prescriptivist features of writing can be facilitated intuitively in a way that is similar to how a child learns to talk.  However, her main contention, that all language teachers must know grammar, should not be debated.  Whether you teach explicit grammar rules or use more indirect forms of persuasion, whether you accept whole language or phonics in the reading development debate, there is no question that teachers must know and understand grammar.

The book of Proverbs promises that when fully trained a student will “become like his teacher.” If I ever become a principal, I will consider giving prospective grammar and language teachers a short quiz during the hiring process; because, most assuredly, if the teacher does not understand the content, the student never will.

Constance Weaver teaches at the University of Western Michigan and has a homepage.

You can help me maintain this site by purchasing this book through my Amazon Affiliates link.

This book can also be purchased through the National Council of Teachers of English. The organization graciously has one chapter of the volume available online.
Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions

Middle schoolers tend to make the same writing mistakes.  Sometimes teachers are required to change the bulletin boards in the classroom.  Solve your bulletin board problems and help students identify their writing problems with this handy print-out for bulletin boards.  This bulletin board display covers many common writing problems: subject-verb agreement, commonly misused verbs, and warning against the obnoxious stuff and things.

Enjoy the file!

Avoid the Middle School Language Traps Bulletin Board (PDF)

The definitive grammar book, the one that sat on Ernest Hemingway’s bookshelf and sparked the sentence diagramming craze of the Industrial Era, is Higher Lessons in English: A Work on English Grammar and Composition by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg.

This book, originally published in 1877, is long out of copyright and freely available in a number of places around the internet including Project Gutenberg, Plain Label Books on Google Book Search, and the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately, the versions available are next to useless. Each of them was scanned and then interpreted by OCR (object character recognition) software and converted to plain text or some other form of PDF or e-book. The versions freely available on the internet are either totally readible, but impossible to download or easy to download but impossible to read. The problem is that OCR software can’t understand sentence diagrams, and that is what the bulk of this text covers.

Sometime back I did download an actual scanned-PDF, ancient-Kansas City-library version of Lessons in Higher English.  Sadly, I can’t remember the site that I obtained the file; and despite searching for it, I can’t find the original. 

This amazing version of the text has been sitting on my school computer drive taking up space, and today I’ve decided to make this useful, clearly readable version of the text available for download.

If anyone knows a site that offers the original Reed and Kellogg books in scanned PDF form for download, please send me an e-mail or post it in the comments section.

In case you’re interested, the text of the answer key, The Key Containing Diagrams of the Sentences Given for Analysis, is available to view online at the Internet Archive. (If you want to download it, you must click print first.)The full text scan that you can download is utterly useless.

Download the File

Higher Lessons in English by Brainerd Kellogg and Alonzo Reed (PDF).

A hard copy of this book may also be purchased through my Amazon Associates account. For this website to benefit, you must click the link.

I created this Easy Complement Finder flowchart for students that have difficulty determing correct pronoun-antecedent agreement. It should also help students locate and use pronouns correctly when dealing with direct and indirect objects.  It is the first of several grammar resources that I intend to add to this site in the upcoming months.

It is available for download in both PDF and Word document formats. 

I’ve given this a Creative Commons License so feel free to remix, reuse, or send this to anyone that you wish.  The only thing that I ask is that you don’t remove the link to this website, place a traditional copyright on it, or sell it for profit.

Download

Easy Complement Finder – PDF Format

Easy Complement Finder – Word 2007 Format