The Sentence: A Love Affair

Gertrude Stein said, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." This tool has fallen out of favor in most English classrooms, but as writers we have much to learn about writing clear, correct sentences; taking a close look at their structure is a first step towards doing so. Plus, as writers in Stein's time knew well, diagramming sentences is a really cool trick and fun parlor game. In this class we'll look closely at effective sentences and how to write them. We will begin by learning from the greats, piecing apart beautiful (and terrible) sentences from books, magazines, and newspapers, in order to understand why they are (or aren't) working. Then we'll turn review the basic grammatical parts of a sentence and learn how to diagram. We will discuss subjects and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and ending with complex compound sentences, "verbals," noun clauses, and appositives. The class will involve writing and workshopping, and will end with the class diagramming one of Proust's famously labyrinthine sentences together.