How to Diagram a Sentence

Need to know how to diagram a sentence? You may dimly remember trying to create sentence diagrams in grade school. It's tricky at first, but sentence diagrams really will help your child learn the parts of speech and how they work together.

Get Ready to Diagram
When you diagram a sentence, you'll want to write the sentence on a piece of paper very clearly, leaving plenty of room on the page for notes on and around the sentence. Come up with a code to identify each part of speech, such as bold for nouns, italics for verbs and underlines for compound nouns. Use red for adjectives, blue for adverbs, green for participles, etc. Write your code on the side of the paper.

Next, come up with a short, concise glossary for parts of speech that your child can refer to as needed. A simple glossary will usually do for elementary school assignments:

• Noun: A person, place or thing
• Verb: A word that describes action
• Adjective: Words that modify nouns
• Adverb: Words that modify verbs
• Article: Words that limit, such as "a," "an," or "the"
• Pronoun: Words used in place of a noun, such as "her," "his" and "its"

Methodically work your way through the sentence, identifying all nouns and verbs in the sentence first. Move on to identify adjectives and adverbs. Help your child see the difference between a pronoun and noun, showing him how the word can be identified either way. Use your codes on words that work in more than one way so your child will understand what each word is doing in the sentence. 

Creating a Diagram
Once the parts of speech are identified, diagramming is a simple matter of putting them where they belong. Classic sentence diagrams underline and separate parts of the sentence with vertical, horizontal and slanted lines. Consider the following sentence:

Emily cheered.

This is a very simple sentence with a subject and a verb. The diagram of this sentence would look like this:

Emily | cheered.

Subject | verb

Sentence diagrams all begin with the subject and the verb. From there, additional parts of speech are added, depending on whether they modify the subject or the verb. Modifiers are placed beneath the part of the sentence that they act on. They should be connected with slanted lines. Add some slanted lines to the example below, and you'll see how it should work.

The happy cat purred loudly.

cat | purred

 the

  happy         loudly

subject | verb

  article

   adjective         adverb

In this example, you'd draw a slanted line connecting "happy" to "cat" and "loudly" to "purred." On the slant connecting "happy" to "cat," you'd add "the" to represent the article in the sentence.