The Great Diagram

Just for fun: a poster of sentence diagrams of the first sentences of famous novels made the rounds on the Internet last week, and the Paris Review decided to take a look at the history of sentence diagrams:

As a pedagogical device, sentence diagrams have fallen out of fashion; I never had to draw them (if that’s even the right verb) in school, nor was I made to study any grammar beyond the rudimentary parts of speech. This makes me feel like a fraud whenever I pretend to be a grammarian, as I often do. In fact, before today, I’d never heard of the Reed-Kellogg System; it sounds to me like a proprietary method for processing and packaging cornflakes.

Actually, it dates back to 1877, when it was invented by two men with great names, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg.

You can see it all here.