Back in January, Jeff was struggling with structuring a particular sentence to describe the rules of a new game he was developing, so he contacted me–the family English guru. It was a tricky question, but the issue was quickly solved by diagramming the sentence.

I don’t think English teachers teach sentence diagramming any more, and I doubt if many of them even know how to do it. It’s a useful lost skill that my elementary school teacher (another English guru) taught us. Diagramming provides a place for every grammatical category–parts of speech as well as sentence components–for any sentence. The most complicated sentence I ever diagrammed was the thesis for my master’s degree in Educational Administration. I was allowed one sentence to describe the entire thesis, but diagramming helped me make that long sentence clear.

Here’s the sentence I diagrammed for Jeff. See if you can read it as it should be written.

It says, “Each of your cities produces, in addition to its normal production, one metal.” The interrupting phrase could also be placed at the beginning or at the end of the sentence to read, “In addition to its normal production, each of your cities produces one metal,” or “Each of your cities produces one metal, in addition to its normal production.” In any of these variations, the diagram would be identical because of the modifiers to the subject, the verb, and the direct object.