A Picture of Language. Joe Mortis Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. [1] His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.” A Picture of Language. The Most Comma Mistakes. Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
As I noted in my earlier article, rules and conventions about when to use and not to use commas are legion. But certain errors keep popping up. Here are a few of them. Identification Crisis If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like: