Lesson 1: The Basics of a Sentence
Introduction to Diagramming
A diagram is a picture of a sentence. It helps us graphically show the structure of a sentence and the relationship between a sentence’s words. Diagrams do not show punctuation and are not concerned with sentence purpose—so you will not be able to tell from a diagram if the sentence was a question, declaration, etc.
Note: We are going to learn diagramming the way that it is done in our NT Greek course for biblical texts, not the way it is commonly done in English classes. So if you have learned to diagram in English previously, you will notice minor differences.
For our first foray into diagramming, you only need to know one “shelf.” It looks like this:
This is the subject-verb shelf. Every sentence diagram starts with one of these, since every sentence has a subject and a verb. The subject goes on the upper left space, and the verb goes in the upper right space:
Let’s take the first S-Vi sentence we looked at in the previous step: “Carl woke up.” We would diagram this sentence as follows:
Your turn! Diagram “Carl woke up.” using the words provided.
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