In praise of eighth-grade English teachers.

I write a daily political blog. It helps to have diagrammed sentences.

Today's blog post is a respite from politics. Instead, it is a post about writing a blog about politics.

I want to express my gratitude to my eighth-grade English teacher, Ray Lewis. We learn our native language's grammar rules without understanding what we know. Mr. Lewis gave me the names and reason for what I knew in the grammar-voice in my head. Mr. Lewis taught 6 classes of 30 and we had a month or two learning how to diagram sentences.

From Gettysburg Address

Diagramming sentences was standard educational practice in the early 20th century, but was near the end of its run by my Junior High School era. Most students hated it and educators were concluding that diagramming didn't teach sentence structure. It only taught people how to do something useless in itself--to diagram sentences. The growing theory was that students learned to write better by writing, not diagramming. If a reader remembers diagramming as useless tedium and wants educational justification for hating it, read this: Click: The Atlantic. "The wrong way to teach grammar."

My strongest memory of diagramming was that when facing a complex sentence, the first thing to do was to discard all the phrases and meanderings. Find the central action of the sentence. Subject and verb, and maybe object. Example: Boy throws ball. Descriptions of the boy and the ball and how he threw it were all secondary add-ons.

Mr. Lewis and diagramming sentences came strongly to mind yesterday when I considered this sentence, which appeared in Rick Millward's Guest Post yesterday.

"Overcoming what are basically fatalistic, or what some call "realist", attitudes requires an enormous a leap of faith and a commitment to optimism that seems naive in these times, but completely necessary if we are to survive as a species."

Does that sentence sound right? We will get back to it in a moment.

Ray Lewis, 1962

Mr. Lewis was a veteran teacher in the Medford School system. I attended those schools, entering first grade in 1955 and graduating from Medford High School in 1967. Notice that I said graduating from high school, not that I "graduated high school," a construction that sounds "wrong" in my ear. Dictionaries still frown on that construction, but it is no longer described as incorrect. Graduate can be a transitive verb, but it is something schools do to students. Example: "Medford High graduated 700 students." A student herself graduates from Medford High. Usage has changed out from under me in the past fifty years. Intelligent, well-educated people, who use good grammar generally, now commonly say they graduated a school. A dominant theory of a language is that rules describe how people communicate, they doesn't prescribe how people should communicate. Language changes. Words get new meanings. "Reboot" no longer has a primary meaning of changing shoes. 

Diagramming sentences was commonly taught in the eighth grade. Let me stop my story again to make another grammar point. Notice that in the first paragraph of this post I wrote "eighth-grade" with a hyphen, but in the sentence just above I wrote "eight grade" with no hyphen.  What's going on?

As my eighth-grade teacher explained, when an adjective and a noun are a single unit, acting as an adjective, they take the hyphen. ("What kind of teacher was it? An eighth-grade teacher." Eighth-grade is a unit, together modifying the word teacher.) But when I wrote that diagramming is taught in the eighth grade, eighth is the adjective modifying grade, a noun that could stand alone. (When is it taught? In a grade. Which grade? Eighth grade.) There are two parts of speech and not a unit. No hyphen.

Is there a grammatical error in Rick Millward's quoted sentence? 

The sentence is long and there is a tricky spot: "attitudes requires."  That sounds wrong, especially when read aloud. After all, attitudes are plural, so it needs a plural form of the verb--require, and the words are adjacent. Are you sure that require wouldn't be better?

That brings me back to Mr. Lewis. To diagram a long and complex sentence we need to establish what word is the subject, which the verb. The subject of that sentence is overcoming, not attitudes, and it is singular. Attitudes is the object, not the subject. Think of it as a diagramming problem and simplify the sentence to its barest. "Overcoming requires leap." Subject, verb, object. Everything else dangles off that core.

The sentence is correct as written.

Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Thanks, too, to Tam Moore, the journalist who wrote a Guest Post last week. He regularly sends me a list of grammar and proofreading errors he finds in my posts, and I can usually correct them before the posts get sent out as an email. He is good that that job, even on complex sentences like Millward's. His observation as a journalist was that the sentence was too long and complex, though grammatical. The goal in journalism is clear communication. Short sentences are better.

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