I have a new hero in the world of education. His name is Thomas Lott and he teaches at Nativity Preparatory Academy on Gregory Street. I toured the small Catholic school for grades 5-7 this morning, ...

I read an article last month about the lost art of diagramming sentences, a once-required skill that many American children had to master if they wanted to pass English back in the mid-20th century.

Say “sentence diagramming” to people of a certain age, and you get reactions ranging from, “Oh, I was really good at that in eighth grade,” to “Mrs. Green made us diagram The Rime of the Ancient ...

Sentence diagramming is the long division of English. It involves a bewildering array of lines and diagonal branches. It is loathed as an elementary school chore. And it is presumed to be obsolete.

When we first learned how to diagram sentences back in middle school, it was a total pain in the ass. The exercise was complicated and seemingly superfluous. How useful was scrawling a preposition on ...

The writer Stephen King pushes people who want to write well to "read, read, read." Reading a wide variety of writing can feel like riding waves of language: words, sentences, paragraphs — all of ...