No, Virginia, Diagramming Will Not Improve Students’ Writing

By Edgar H. Schuster

The recently revised Standards of Learning of the Commonwealth of Virginia consider sentence diagramming an “essential skill” and mandate that it be taught in grades 6-8. Frankly, if English teachers can create widespread enthusiasm and whole-class success with diagrams, more power to them.

There are certainly worse ways of spending class time—spelling bees, for example, in which every kid in the class but one flunks in a very public way. But anyone who believes that future graduates of Virginia schools will be better writers than students from other states needs to look at history. And I include Diane Ravitch and Linda Chavez, both of whom have testified that diagramming made them better writers.

When diagramming is talked of in the press or in pre-graduate-school classrooms, it nearly always refers to the system established by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in 1877, the so-called R&K diagrams. As Kitty Burns Florey says in her charming reminiscence of diagramming (“Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog”), that system “swept through American public schools like the measles.” (It swept through America’s Roman Catholic schools...