parsing/diagramming

Do you ever think about sentence parsing/diagramming? Probably not. I think my generation might've been the last generation to even bother with the exercise. I recall that we did diagramming (I didn't hear the term parsing until I was in college*) in the 8th grade, in Mr. Gray's English class. I had no fucking idea what was going on or—as many kids of that age might wonder—why this activity was useful, or what purpose it served. I don't recall that we ever did any diagramming in high school.

Diagramming is a form of analysis, and analysis is a mental activity in which you break something down into component parts, then study how those parts interrelate. An analytical approach can take a myriad different forms. For example, if I were to analyze a dog, I could analyze it in terms of its body parts and their functions. I could also analyze any individual dog in terms of its various behaviors. I could also do a cross-species analysis of dogs in terms of their physical attributes, their behaviors, their life spans, etc.

Analysis doesn't matter to most of us until we really need it. Let's say you're driving down a road when you get into an accident. Maybe you've run into a tree, or another car has crashed into yours. There's the blinding flash of impact, and when you wake up and orient yourself, your car is a crumpled mess, and you've got long shards of metal poking through the meat of your body. Who's more likely to survive such a situation with a minimum of problems later—someone who's never analyzed the human body, or someone who's got some analytical knowledge of how the body works? And whom would you prefer to see rescuing you from your wreck—an untrained civilian or a trained first-responder? Analysis matters.

Analyzing, or parsing, the parts of a sentence can be beneficial, too. You take the major parts of the sentence and break it into smaller parts. In English, parsing proceeds a certain way:

There are tons of resources out there that show you how to parse. I admit I'm not very good at the procedure anymore; I tend to "analyze on the fly," going from large elements of a sentence (e.g., subject, predicate) to smaller elements (article 1, simple subject, prepositional phrase, article 2, preposition, simple predicate, verbal object, etc.). It's more of an instinctual thing. But while I'm not following any orthodox procedure, the analysis still helps.

Example: Knowing what a clause is and what rules apply to which types of clauses can be a good way to avoid certain embarrassing fuckups. Of course, if you're linguistically dim, you won't even know you've fucked up, so you won't have the decency to be embarrassed. Taking pride in one's self-expression has been an ongoing theme on this blog and on my Substack. Those who don't take any pride are, as I've said before, like the litterers at a park—the slobs who go, "Bleh... someone'll come along and clean that up." Good self-expression means clarity and logicality of thought, and it at least implies a certain level of mental self-discipline, a quality that slobs don't possess.

Dr. M. Scott Peck argued, in his The Road Less Traveled, that the greatest, most fundamental human sin is laziness—not rebellious pride or arrogant conceit. Laziness is the inertia that keeps one trapped at one's current level, dog paddling in the shallow end of the kiddie pool when a whole ocean is just down the way. Learning how to think analytically is a good first step to moving beyond where one is. (And don't confuse laziness with contentment, which is a much more profound thing.)

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*Pedantry alert: Diagramming, as the term implies, is more visual in nature, like what you see in the above graphic. Parsing refers more abstractly to the analysis of a sentence's parts. It's the analytical thought process behind the creation of the sentence diagram. So I guess what I do "on the fly" counts more as parsing than as diagramming.