A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences : NPR Ed. The design firm Pop Chart Lab has taken the first lines of famous novels and diagrammed those sentences.
This one shows the opening of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Pop Chart Lab When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words — not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a little zany. And while it was once commonplace, many people today don't even know what it is. So let's start with the basics. "It's a fairly simple idea," says Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.
I asked her to show me, and for an example she used the first sentence she recalls diagramming: "The dog barked. " An Education 'Phenomenon' Burns Florey and other experts trace the origin of diagramming sentences back to 1877 and two professors at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. "It was a purely American phenomenon," Burns Florey says. Infographic: What Does Your Handwriting Say About You? Graphology--the study of handwriting--has long been considered a pseudoscience, in the same family as phrenology (in which a lumpy forehead could mean you’re a psychopath) and astrology (in which Mercury makes you forget your keys).
But a new study by the National Pen Association (sure, consider your source) claims that the way you write can indicate more than 5,000 personality traits, as well as tendencies toward serious disorders like schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. The results are parsed in an infographic that may offend any intrusive, lazy, and impatient writers out there with narrowly spaced letters, short-crossed t’s, and slashed i’s. Good news for wide-loopers of l’s and e’s though: You are relaxed, spontaneous, and open-minded.
If you write with heavy pressure, you might be good with commitments, too. The infographic also demonstrates that unlike phrenology, graphology hasn’t been completely snuffed out by skeptics. What Does Your Handwriting Say About You? A New Infographic by National Pen. Kelly Gallagher – Resources. Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page.
They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students’ prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text. Below you will find the articles I assigned* this year (2013-2014) to my students. "How Earth Got Its Tectonic Plates/On Saturn's Moon Titan, Scientists Catch Waves in Methane Lakes" by Monte Morin for the Los Angeles Times and by Amina Kahn for the Los Angeles Times, respectively "Hard Evidence: Are We Beating Cancer? " Knowble Articles.
News/ Current Events. Social Studies Texts. I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why. - Kyle Wiens. By Kyle Wiens | 8:02 AM July 20, 2012 If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me.
If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building. Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss’s more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar “stickler.” And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid. Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have “zero tolerance.” Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. But grammar is relevant for all companies. Good grammar makes good business sense — and not just when it comes to hiring writers. Wrong.