Semiotics of the Sentence

"Indentured servants became indentured servants because they either sold themsleves or were kidnapped into slavery. Those who sold themselves into slavery were often looking for the opportunie of dinding wealth and being well off in money."

This tangled spaggetti sentence and its several misspellings are an example of the challenge of teaching good writing. Effective writing. Writing that makes sense. (And, yes, I tend to write with sentence fragments, but that for later.) For full disclosure, I am not an English/Language Arts teacher. But for history and history essays, writing effectively is a tool that is necessary. How you do that has become a battleground of educational theory and philosophy.

Semiotics is the study of signs and meanings. The following is one of the "signs" that symbolizes the controversy and battle in educational circles over the teaching of language and writing.


Sentence diagramming was introduced in 1877 as a "reform" to better teach grammar by providing a visual structure. It just happens that graphic organizers are all the rage for teaching the generation of ideas, brainstorming, and organizing as an alternative, I suppose, to that nasty old thing, the formal outline. I happen to agree that we should use all the tools at our disposal and not have a rigid outlining formula. Yet, what is a sentence diagram but a graphic organizer? Why are graphic organizers popular and sentence diagramming next to heresy? Why would schools, departments, or districts ban, dogmatically, the teaching of grammar and vocabulary?

Diagramming not only teaches the structure of language within a sentence, but also the recognition of the parts of speech and the function of words in language. As a side effect, it also happens to teach analysis and synthesis--higher order thinking skills. Nevertheless, the sentence diagram has taken on the meaning for many of the dry, boring English classes that students hate. It also doesn't necessarily teach better writing.

Instead, we have the focus on context and reading, reading, reading to get better at writing. I again don't disagree that context is important. But analysis out of context is often just as important to understanding. The bigger battle really is that edu-crats, both at the public school level and in research universities, are under pressure to invent the new--bigger, better, more "research" based, and that takes the teacher out of the professional cycle. Professional judgment is no longer trusted. Responding to student needs has become defined as implementing a particular program.

Diagramming has never really died. But why must we, should we, wait until pendulum swings back into the realm of common sense? Why do we deny to ourselves the very tools that are, at times, the most effective and appropriate instruments that we have to excel?

"Economic opportunities in America were very unusual. Social class, poverty, and slavery are some of the factors that affected the colonists opportunities to succeed."

Ah. Now, that's better.