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Do you find it difficult to put a clear English sentence together? Or maybe you wonder why the word order doesn’t quite work, leading to common mistakes—like mixing up adverbs and adjectives or skipping articles and determiners. You’re not alone. Native speakers are trained from a young age to recognize the parts of speech in sentence structure. Through repeated practice with sentence diagramming, we perfect our ability to build clear and accurate English sentences with proper word order.
So, how can you start connecting the dots of English grammar and make sense of English sentences?
The answer lies in sentence diagramming. By breaking sentences into smaller parts and visually mapping out how those pieces connect, you’ll start to absorb the patterns and relationships that define English sentence structure.
This isn’t just another grammar exercise—it’s your key to fluently and confidently constructing clear English sentences.
What is Sentence Diagramming?
Sentence diagramming is a method of visually representing the structure of a sentence. It shows English learners (native or non-native) how its parts of speech and grammatical elements relate to one another. It breaks a sentence into its components—such as subjects, verbs, objects, and modifiers—and maps out their roles and relationships in a clear, structured format.
This technique helps learners understanding the mechanics of English grammar in the following ways.
- It transforms abstract grammar rules into a visual format
- Sentence diagramming makes it easier to see how words fit together to form clear sentences.
- It supports visual learners instead of relying solely on verbal explanations.
- You’re able to “see” grammar in action, which can be especially helpful for learners struggling with word order, agreement, and other grammatical concepts.
For example, diagramming a sentence like “The cat chased the mouse” visually separates the subject (the cat), verb (chased), and object (the mouse), allowing you to understand their distinct roles. This clarity can help you recognize patterns, avoid common mistakes, and gain confidence in constructing your own sentences.
A Brief History of Sentence Diagramming in Education
Sentence diagramming has been a staple of English education in native-speaking countries for over a century. It originated in the 19th century, when teachers like Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg developed it as a tool to improve students’ grammar skills. Their work, published in the 1877 book Higher Lessons in English, introduced diagramming as a practical method to teach sentence structure.
By the mid-20th century, sentence diagramming was a common feature of classrooms in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Teachers were using it to emphasize how important the parts of speech were along with their relationships. This helped their students understand the “why” behind sentence construction.
Although it’s less common in modern curriculums, it remains a powerful tool for language learners seeking to connect the dots between English grammar and sentence structure.
If you’re interested to learn more about this history, you can read more about the history of sentence diagramming here.
How Sentence Diagramming Works
Anyone can perform a sentence diagram – teacher and learner. All you need is a complete sentence and an understanding of its basic structure.
Step 1: Practice Sentence Diagrams on a complete sentence
Find a sentence from a text or an exercise that you want to break down or create one yourself. There are native speaker grammar exercise books that are excellent for this. These kind of books have specific exercises for you to study sentences for their parts of speech and structure.
If you’re looking for these kinds of exercises, check out my post with recommended English grammar workbooks (coming soon). Now, let’s bring in an example sentence to study.
Step 2: Break the sentence into its sentence segments – Subject, Predicate, and Adverbials.
One thing I tell my students is that a sentence is like a mouse’s body – a short head, small body, and long tail.
- The subject should be concise and center around the subject noun phrase.
- A predicate is the verb and its object – the verb phrase.
- Adverbials are the extra information blocks that express the how, where, when, or why of the verb’s action.
In the above example, you can see the three clear sections of an English sentence. Technically, the adverbials are just extra bits of information. The base structure is the subject and predicate.
Step 3: Identify the phrase types.
There are many phrase types such as:
- Noun Phrases
- Verb Phrases
- Prepositional Phrases
- Infinitive Phrases
- Gerund Phrases
The subject will typically be a noun phrase unless it’s a pronoun. The verb phrase starts off the predicate. Additionally, most adverbials are prepositional phrases, coming after the verb phrase.
This is the distinct pattern of an English sentence.
Step 4: Diagram the individual parts of speech below the sentence.
Draw a line or dotted line down from each word of which you would like to identify. You can do this for every word in the sentence, for select parts of speech, the words from one of the phrases. It’s totally up to you how you want to diagram the sentence’s parts of speech.
Bonus Step 5: Show what’s modifying what with arrows
As a bonus tip, you can identify the modifiers by drawing arrows from the modifier(s) to the thing it or they modify.
Teaching Sentence Diagramming in the Classroom
As a private EFL teacher, my office is my classroom, and I do possess a whiteboard. However, I prefer a digital approach to teaching and note-taking. In this section, let’s look at the different ways you can perform this technique for your students in the classroom or online.
Do Sentence Diagramming the old-fashioned way.
The old-fashioned way of sentence diagramming is by hand. Whether you’re at the whiteboard or writing notes for your student on a piece of paper, just write out the sentence. Make sure to space your words out, so you can divide the sentence into parts.
Underneath the sentence, diagram each word, highlighting each part of speech.
Diagram with OneNote
My digital note-taking tool of choice is Microsoft OneNote for this exact purpose. With OneNote, you can create a table with a simple press of the “tab” button. Hitting the “Enter” button creates another row below.
Personally, my students love it when I break sentences down for them like this.
This simple ability to create tables on the fly makes Microsoft OneNote my go-to for sentence diagramming.
Diagram with PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a wonderful digital tool for English teachers. With this application, you can do sentence diagrams in a number of ways. In fact, the earlier images in this blog post showing you how to diagram sentences step-by-step were all created with PowerPoint:
- Create textboxes, shapes, and arrows.
- Animate the slide and trigger animations when presentation is full screen.
- Use a graphic pen and tablet to give a digital whiteboard effect. Type out the sentence in a textbox or write it out by hand – digitally.
If you know what you’re doing with PowerPoint, it doesn’t take much time to set up your teaching slide.
How English learners Can do Sentence Diagramming
If you’re reading this as an English learner, this is where I advise you how to do sentence diagramming when you’re self-studying English. For starters, you need to find good sentences. As I mentioned earlier in “How Sentence Diagramming Works” section, there are plenty of English Language Arts workbooks with these exact exercises.
Here’s what one of these exercises looks like:
Just perform the mapping steps for each sentence in this exercise.
Another source for good sentences is to do Use of English gap fill exercises. The sentences in these exercises have a gap where you input what you think the missing word is. If you have an understanding of the parts of speech and their relationships, you can do sentence diagramming to solve for the gaps.
It works as follows:
- diagram the parts of speech around the gap.
- Identify what kind of phrase or part of the sentence it is.
- Then based on your diagram, you can figure out what’s missing.
Here’s an example of a gap fill exercise:
Just write that sentence in your copy book. And follow the 4-step process I demonstrated earlier.
A Recommended Workbook to practice Sentence Diagramming on your own
This 48-page language arts book shows visual learners how to diagram sentences to help them understand why some sentences may not sound or look right.
Conclusion: You really need to be doing sentence diagrams to learn the parts of speech
Sentence diagramming is more than just a technique. It’s a useful tool for perfecting your grammar and sentence structure skills.
Whether you’re a teacher looking to engage your students or a learner trying to understand how English sentences work, this method simplifies the grammar into clear, visual relationships. By practicing sentence diagramming, you can comprehend the parts of speech and strengthen your writing skills.
Ready to take your understanding further? Be sure to check out my posts on How to Identify Parts of Speech and How to Teach Parts of Speech for actionable tips and strategies. Don’t forget to explore the comprehensive Pillar Post on Why non-natives English learners need to learn the parts of speech to deepen your knowledge and teaching repertoire. Or even test your skills with a parts of speech online quiz.
Want to Really See Sentence Diagramming at its Finest?
Grab your copy of my recently published English Grammar Explained. It teaches you how English sentences work. One of the main features of the book is the more than 150 diagrammed sentences, illustrating the parts of speech, word order, and sentence complexity. This book will be your English grammar handbook and guide.
If you’ve tried sentence diagramming or plan to incorporate it into your learning or teaching, I’d love to hear about your experience—share your thoughts in the comments!
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