Today I'm starting some grammar with my 14 year old. I have witnessed what school is teaching him, and I am not impressed, so I have dug into my homeschooling stuff and brought out Phyllis Davenport's Rex Barks, a book on sentence diagramming.
I deeply love this book.
The concise case for learning grammar (from the above images):
WHY STUDY THE SENTENCE? We all speak them naturally, so why study how a sentence is constructed? There are many reasons. 1. Power continues to be, generally, in the hands of the educated, who notice when a sentence has something is dreadfully wrong with it. Even the "educationists" who write books about the unimportance of "grammar" do so with the sentences technically correct. 2. Much poetic writing cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be enjoyed, without the skill of turning around unusual word order, "finding the subject and the verb." 3. The study of foreign languages is heavy work without the knowledge of how a sentence operates. 4. Finally, it is satisfying to understand something. You know this. Whether your skill is rebuilding carbureter or programming a VCR, or getting a grilled cheese sandwich toasty but not burned, you have surely tasted the pleasure of competance. Knowledge can bring joy!
Anyhow, for anyone looking to build their writing toolbox, this book is a cozy joy to work through.
