Introductory Sentence Diagramming

I remember learning sentence diagramming when I was in grade school and hating it. Later, when I was in university, I found it was occasionally useful in trying to parse and understand some complex academic prose, but I never used it much after that.

It can be a useful skill for editors, and this article is a good introduction to the technique.

Now it’s important to understand that there are ten sentences patterns in the English language.

Yes, you heard that right.

THERE ARE ONLY TEN WAYS TO SAY SOMETHING IN THE ENTIRE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

I’m sorry for the caps, I’m just always shocked by that fact.

There are only ten kinds of sentences that we can speak daily, and although it feels like we should have more (as English is usually thought of as complex), this one fact about the language is it can be simplified into just ten sentences.

Just ten sentence patterns!

There are four different kinds of verbs, and all ten sentence patterns use at least one kind of verb.