Diagramming—The Key To Understanding Grammar

by Ellen Hajek

Builder Books

Parts of speech are introduced in Chapter One with rules, examples, and exercises. From Chapter Two on, diagramming skills are taught. However, children should have some basic instruction before beginning this course since it covers the parts of speech in very cursory fashion. For example, instruction about nouns essentially teaches that a noun is a person, place, or thing. Discussion about the various roles that nouns might play within a sentence is scattered through lessons on subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, and predicate nouns without thorough instruction.

The heart of this book (and the reason you should use it) is the diagramming lessons. Simple through complex sentences are taught, including participles, infinitives, and gerunds. Sentences to diagram are widely spaced on pages so that students can work within the book. Answers are at the back. Diagramming lessons are interspersed with brief writing assignments so that students can apply grammatical knowledge to their own sentence construction. As a diagramming tool, this is less complex and has fewer exercises than AMG Publisher’s Learning English with the Bible, but it does offer more variety in exercises.