This is very powerful and a very clearly put article. I look back at my own education (I am 71) trying to figure out how I learned to understand complex ideas. I know we had instruction in sentence structure, but I am not sure that would have been enough for me. I believe it was combining it with the love of reading that did the trick.
I need to look back through your posts and see if you have addressed this part of the issue: so many young people just don't read books. Short little blips on social media are one thing, but following a plot that you have become infested in, now THAT can make you value & increase your level of understanding!
I'm age 81, and like you I also developed a lifelong love of reading. I think it helped that my dad started teaching me to read before I was three. In grade school in Chicago, Illinois in the 1950s I was taught how to diagram sentences. I enjoyed that puzzle solving activity, perhaps for the same reasons that eventually led me into a career of computer programming, which requires understanding both the syntax and semantics of programming languages for reading and writing programs.
BTW, I suspect you meant "invested" rather than "infested" in "a plot that you have become infested in", although "infested" does conjure up some amusing images.
I also was taught diagramming. I'm 75. I commented in support of it above. Where did diagramming go? And, full disclosure, I read "invested." Brain autocorrect. That doesn't work with coding as you know.
I was also taught sentence diagramming in high school (in roughly 1985) and was completely confused by it. My brain just never saw the connections. I easily understood grammar without it, but traditional diagramming was irrational to me. Then I went to college as an English major and was introduced to transformational diagramming—and the world opened up. I literally turned into a diagramming geek. It’s a much more logical “tree” structure. I’ve only ever known one other English teacher besides myself who teaches it!
Really appreciate the specifity in this article. As someone who has been designing learning instructional materials across diverse subjects, I have seen too many people make the mistake of equating knowledge about a thing as the ability to do the thing. Assuming that knowledge about active and passive voice, grammatical structure, defination of subordinating conjunction is the same as being able to comprehend sentences is an example of this common error.
I taught ELA and social studies classes off/on through most of my teaching career (‘89-2024). I was teaching remedial writing PT for jr. college students in the early 2000s when I realized that explicit instruction in sentence structure, with a sharp focus on comprehension of complex sentences, was sorely needed. My previous experience in ELA hadn’t taught me that - I was struggling in my early years just to stay afloat; though I’d used sentence combining, the emphasis in the 90s leaned toward lit instruction and away from deeper immersion in formalities. My JC students were almost entirely native speakers but it was obvious from their early sem. writing samples that they had an incomplete grasp of sentence variety and needed help. So I dove in and did my best.
I moved around but saw the same problem elsewhere. It was particularly acute with kids I taught in an inner-city high school, many of whom were EL or had recently tested out of that status. The syntactical differences between English and Spanish were the main culprit, but other factors also played a role. By then there was hardly even any institutional awareness of the issue, let alone plans to come to grips with it, since most of the ELA dept. was too young to have gotten much instruction in it themselves.
This is such an important piece. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between what research tells us and what actually reaches classroom practice. Your point about the silos is exactly right. SLPs see syntax and language comprehension problems every day, but that knowledge rarely crosses into classroom instruction.
A passage such as this not only involves a mix of vocabulary: pioneers, settled, territory, east, west, named mountains & rivers, and syntactic forms, but also encompasses strong directional and spatial elements. Unless these can be integrated into a coherent mental image, comprehension remains fragmented.
I wonder whether the Kilgallon "sentence composing" approach would be helpful here--not just reading more complex sentences or being asked to write them out of the blue, but giving students model sentences (from literature, ideally) to use as scaffolds or structures to use when composing their own sentences.
Diagramming could also help. I know it's old-fashioned, but when I explored it with middle-schoolers in NYC, years ago, they loved it. It was like realizing for the first time that there was a skeleton inside a body, holding the whole thing up.
Julie Van Dyke, a psycholinguist who studies language comprehension and syntax, has created a tool called Cascade that breaks text into meaningful syntactic units (clauses, phrases, etc.) so you can help students see that skeleton. It's the same idea as diagramming, but presented functionally to help promote awareness, fluency, and comprehension. I've checked it out, but haven't used it with students yet. Worth a look.
Interesting. I just played with it a little, and I think it works pretty well. I gave it some of the Declaration of Independence, some John Locke, and the opening of "A Tale of Two Cities," and it parsed all of them decently.
As an elementary student in the 1960s, sentence diagramming helped locate subject, predicate and the associated modifiers. It helped to identify, almost by rhythm, prepositional phrases and their objects. Locating the nouns or verbs helped eliminate the "Appalachian Mountains" types of confusion described in this article. Tense and voice were similarly teased out of a complex sentence. Seeing my diagramming, my teachers could easily see where I had weaknesses in understanding the relationship between words, the formation of clauses and other empirical writing characteristics.
Maybe bring that old technique back. It easily scales from Dick and Jane to Joyce and Faulkner. Sometimes you have to turn the paper longways.
Thinking about the technique, I don't remember the notation method for compound sentences. I know there was one. Yet the knowledge that a notation exists says that deconstructing those sentences was a part of the learning. So it seems pretty adaptable.
I also remember sentence diagramming -- in fact, I just came across some sentence diagrams I did in sixth grade. I remember enjoying it. Whether it made me a better reader or writer, I can't say. I do know that studies indicate that for most students, those kinds of activities don't carry over to improvements in their own writing.
Well. the default choice for most influential factor in proper grammar, sentence construction and comprehension is still probably having been raised in a household where those practices were observed. This is households of means with parents who are themselves well educated. Think buyers of the Harry Potter series. The Sorting Hat might serve well to concentrate on kids who do not have that advantage except that sorting carries stigma.
The humanities preserve the record of what human beings have loved, feared, built, destroyed, and regretted. Losing that memory makes every generation easier to fool.
I know that entertainment is an objective of current education but am I the last adult to have learned syntax by diagramming sentences? When faced with a dense and convoluted sentence I go back through to identify and classify the words or phrases. Damn, it works every time! When we stopped teaching foundations in favor of keeping the kids attention we cut students off from the tools they need.
Natalie, I admire your work and I use The Writing Revolution. But I read your occasional comments warning against teaching grammar with dismay. I am surprised to see Natalie Wexler arguing against teaching knowledge. I hope that at some point you are willing to write more about this to clear up possible misunderstanding and misdirection. It is not clear what you mean by "traditional grammar instruction." Is the problem with the way it was taught or with the concepts themselves, such as the parts of speech? At times you seem to be arguing against teaching the parts of speech, as in your footnote here: "Traditional grammar instruction, focusing on rules and parts of speech, doesn’t actually result in better writing for many students. Some studies have even found that such instruction makes students’ writing worse, according to one meta-analysis." This argument has been out there for decades, long before Steve Graham's 2014 meta-analysis. But the claim of grammar instruction advocates isn't that teaching grammar terms directly results in better writing. The claim is that teaching grammar terms gives the teacher and students a common vocabulary for discussing writing. That is all. It is merely a first step that sets up the work to follow. And it is the writing and discussion that follows that makes the difference, not learning terms. I think the same could be said about sentence combining and other activities. They often don't carry over into better writing and require deliberate attention to application. My concern about the contemporary practice that discourages grammar instruction but recognizes the importance of understanding complex structures is that it withholds the knowledge that students need to make sense of complex structures. It seems to ask us to teach more advanced concepts, such as appositives or past participles, without students knowing the parts of speech and other basic concepts. That knowledge is not sufficient, but is necessary. Bypassing basic grammar seems to go against the idea of sequenced instruction. Again, I agree with the general thrust of your work and with the idea here that helping students understand complex sentences is useful in many ways. The question, as always, is how to go about doing that. There is much more to say about this. One last question: are you saying that we should not teach the parts of speech?
I may not be able to address all of the points in your comment, but I'll do my best! I do feel it's important to teach grammar, but -- as you say -- I agree with you that rules and parts of speech aren't enough for most students. And I agree with you that grammar terms can provide a valuable common vocabulary for discussing writing.
What we may disagree on is whether it should be a "first step." Maybe for some students, but for others, teaching grammatical terms initially could just make things more confusing--even simple terms like "subject" and "verb." I'm basing this mostly on what I've learned from Judith Hochman. If students are young and/or very inexperienced readers or writers, and they've produced a sentence fragment rather than a complete sentence, it can work best to approach things in a more functional way. If the sentence lacks a verb, for example, the teacher might say, "but what are they DOING?" At some point, of course, teachers should introduce the grammatical terms, but it may not work best to do that initially. It could just produce cognitive overload.
When you talk about teaching "more advanced concepts, such as appositives or past participles," before teaching the parts of speech, I'm not sure whether you're referring to The Writing Revolution or something else. TWR does teach appositives, but it doesn't explicitly teach past participles. In any event, the grammatical terms that are explicitly taught through TWR were chosen for their value as a shared vocabulary that will promote the use of complex syntax. An appositive is a construction that shows up a lot in written language but rarely in oral language, so it makes sense to focus on it. If students know the term, a teacher can say "add an appositive," and students will understand what to do. Other grammatical terms--like "prepositional phrase" -- have less leverage. Students are probably already using prepositional phrases, because they appear a lot in oral language, so why focus on teaching that terminology?
I'm definitely in favor of imparting knowledge, including knowledge of grammar. But I feel we need to focus on the knowledge that's going to be most valuable.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. You addressed my points very well. I want to be clear that I realize that a comment in a post about a larger point or in a footnote does not represent your full thinking on the matter of teaching grammar and is not meant as a definitive statement. Your added thoughts make a lot of sense and go a long way toward clarifying these matters. I'll offer a few additional thoughts, but I am not thinking these questions can be resolved here.
As far as teaching grammar terms as a first step goes, yes, for very young students and struggling learners it might not be effective to start with the terms. We have to keep cognitive load in mind and it is very difficult to teach these terms and have students retain and apply them. But my comment on grammar terms being a first step was not about teaching early elementary students, it was in response to that oft-repeated, bare-bones statement that traditional grammar instruction does not lead to better writing and may do harm. That is the same conclusion reached by the report of Braddock, et al in 1963 and adopted by the National Council of Teachers of English. It is not limited by age group, or experience, or any particular point in the learning process. It is a blanket statement against grammar instruction, including the parts of speech. For teachers, it raises a fundamental question: should we teach grammar, even basic concepts such as the parts of speech, at all? I am glad to hear you say that we should. The questions are how, when, and how much. That moves us forward.
The question of how much grammar to teach raises the second point. I was referring to The Writing Revolution by mentioning appositives, and to David Didau's book Writing Fitness when mentioning past participles. I mentioned both terms as examples of approaches that include advanced grammar concepts but seem to skip the parts of speech. An appositive is a noun phrase. But what is a noun? What is a phrase? A past participle is a verb form that can be used as a different part of speech. One response to the problems caused by the research discrediting grammar instruction is to take a minimalist approach and teach a select few terms. That seems to be what is happening here. I can see the reasoning behind that. Grammar study quickly gets technical and complicated. We cannot teach everything. But can we say that we understand something well if we do not have the vocabulary to think and talk about it? That is the open question for me.
That is enough for now. I will look at TRW's resources to see how we might introduce the concept of appositives with sufficient explanation. Natalie, I am grateful for your dedicated work on these important matters and am always interested to read your new posts.
Do you think syntax might be easier to grasp for children who speak multiple languages? Who might encounter the same syntactic concepts in their two native languages, but expressed differently, and would that make them more salient?
Maybe -- I don't know if there's been any research on that. We do tend to teach grammar more explicitly when we're teaching kids a new language, which might help (if they even still do that!).
This is very powerful and a very clearly put article. I look back at my own education (I am 71) trying to figure out how I learned to understand complex ideas. I know we had instruction in sentence structure, but I am not sure that would have been enough for me. I believe it was combining it with the love of reading that did the trick.
I need to look back through your posts and see if you have addressed this part of the issue: so many young people just don't read books. Short little blips on social media are one thing, but following a plot that you have become infested in, now THAT can make you value & increase your level of understanding!
Thanks! I probably have addressed the decline in book-reading on my Substack somewhere, but I know I addressed it in this magazine piece (no paywall):
https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2025-2026/wexler
The Atlantic did a long story about post literacy; The End of Reading Is Here
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?gift=XT3hL6hZUvUpJzvHlb9_G-IaR_oy0Lqs_rfqQwnxXps&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I'm age 81, and like you I also developed a lifelong love of reading. I think it helped that my dad started teaching me to read before I was three. In grade school in Chicago, Illinois in the 1950s I was taught how to diagram sentences. I enjoyed that puzzle solving activity, perhaps for the same reasons that eventually led me into a career of computer programming, which requires understanding both the syntax and semantics of programming languages for reading and writing programs.
BTW, I suspect you meant "invested" rather than "infested" in "a plot that you have become infested in", although "infested" does conjure up some amusing images.
I also was taught diagramming. I'm 75. I commented in support of it above. Where did diagramming go? And, full disclosure, I read "invested." Brain autocorrect. That doesn't work with coding as you know.
I was also taught sentence diagramming in high school (in roughly 1985) and was completely confused by it. My brain just never saw the connections. I easily understood grammar without it, but traditional diagramming was irrational to me. Then I went to college as an English major and was introduced to transformational diagramming—and the world opened up. I literally turned into a diagramming geek. It’s a much more logical “tree” structure. I’ve only ever known one other English teacher besides myself who teaches it!
Really appreciate the specifity in this article. As someone who has been designing learning instructional materials across diverse subjects, I have seen too many people make the mistake of equating knowledge about a thing as the ability to do the thing. Assuming that knowledge about active and passive voice, grammatical structure, defination of subordinating conjunction is the same as being able to comprehend sentences is an example of this common error.
I taught ELA and social studies classes off/on through most of my teaching career (‘89-2024). I was teaching remedial writing PT for jr. college students in the early 2000s when I realized that explicit instruction in sentence structure, with a sharp focus on comprehension of complex sentences, was sorely needed. My previous experience in ELA hadn’t taught me that - I was struggling in my early years just to stay afloat; though I’d used sentence combining, the emphasis in the 90s leaned toward lit instruction and away from deeper immersion in formalities. My JC students were almost entirely native speakers but it was obvious from their early sem. writing samples that they had an incomplete grasp of sentence variety and needed help. So I dove in and did my best.
I moved around but saw the same problem elsewhere. It was particularly acute with kids I taught in an inner-city high school, many of whom were EL or had recently tested out of that status. The syntactical differences between English and Spanish were the main culprit, but other factors also played a role. By then there was hardly even any institutional awareness of the issue, let alone plans to come to grips with it, since most of the ELA dept. was too young to have gotten much instruction in it themselves.
This is such an important piece. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between what research tells us and what actually reaches classroom practice. Your point about the silos is exactly right. SLPs see syntax and language comprehension problems every day, but that knowledge rarely crosses into classroom instruction.
Thank you for laying this out so clearly.
A passage such as this not only involves a mix of vocabulary: pioneers, settled, territory, east, west, named mountains & rivers, and syntactic forms, but also encompasses strong directional and spatial elements. Unless these can be integrated into a coherent mental image, comprehension remains fragmented.
I wonder whether the Kilgallon "sentence composing" approach would be helpful here--not just reading more complex sentences or being asked to write them out of the blue, but giving students model sentences (from literature, ideally) to use as scaffolds or structures to use when composing their own sentences.
Diagramming could also help. I know it's old-fashioned, but when I explored it with middle-schoolers in NYC, years ago, they loved it. It was like realizing for the first time that there was a skeleton inside a body, holding the whole thing up.
Julie Van Dyke, a psycholinguist who studies language comprehension and syntax, has created a tool called Cascade that breaks text into meaningful syntactic units (clauses, phrases, etc.) so you can help students see that skeleton. It's the same idea as diagramming, but presented functionally to help promote awareness, fluency, and comprehension. I've checked it out, but haven't used it with students yet. Worth a look.
https://cascadereading.com/education/
Interesting. I just played with it a little, and I think it works pretty well. I gave it some of the Declaration of Independence, some John Locke, and the opening of "A Tale of Two Cities," and it parsed all of them decently.
As an elementary student in the 1960s, sentence diagramming helped locate subject, predicate and the associated modifiers. It helped to identify, almost by rhythm, prepositional phrases and their objects. Locating the nouns or verbs helped eliminate the "Appalachian Mountains" types of confusion described in this article. Tense and voice were similarly teased out of a complex sentence. Seeing my diagramming, my teachers could easily see where I had weaknesses in understanding the relationship between words, the formation of clauses and other empirical writing characteristics.
Maybe bring that old technique back. It easily scales from Dick and Jane to Joyce and Faulkner. Sometimes you have to turn the paper longways.
Thinking about the technique, I don't remember the notation method for compound sentences. I know there was one. Yet the knowledge that a notation exists says that deconstructing those sentences was a part of the learning. So it seems pretty adaptable.
I also remember sentence diagramming -- in fact, I just came across some sentence diagrams I did in sixth grade. I remember enjoying it. Whether it made me a better reader or writer, I can't say. I do know that studies indicate that for most students, those kinds of activities don't carry over to improvements in their own writing.
Well. the default choice for most influential factor in proper grammar, sentence construction and comprehension is still probably having been raised in a household where those practices were observed. This is households of means with parents who are themselves well educated. Think buyers of the Harry Potter series. The Sorting Hat might serve well to concentrate on kids who do not have that advantage except that sorting carries stigma.
The humanities preserve the record of what human beings have loved, feared, built, destroyed, and regretted. Losing that memory makes every generation easier to fool.
Nice piece.
I know that entertainment is an objective of current education but am I the last adult to have learned syntax by diagramming sentences? When faced with a dense and convoluted sentence I go back through to identify and classify the words or phrases. Damn, it works every time! When we stopped teaching foundations in favor of keeping the kids attention we cut students off from the tools they need.
Diagram sentences. We did it on a dusty chalkboard.
Thanks for writing this.
Natalie, I admire your work and I use The Writing Revolution. But I read your occasional comments warning against teaching grammar with dismay. I am surprised to see Natalie Wexler arguing against teaching knowledge. I hope that at some point you are willing to write more about this to clear up possible misunderstanding and misdirection. It is not clear what you mean by "traditional grammar instruction." Is the problem with the way it was taught or with the concepts themselves, such as the parts of speech? At times you seem to be arguing against teaching the parts of speech, as in your footnote here: "Traditional grammar instruction, focusing on rules and parts of speech, doesn’t actually result in better writing for many students. Some studies have even found that such instruction makes students’ writing worse, according to one meta-analysis." This argument has been out there for decades, long before Steve Graham's 2014 meta-analysis. But the claim of grammar instruction advocates isn't that teaching grammar terms directly results in better writing. The claim is that teaching grammar terms gives the teacher and students a common vocabulary for discussing writing. That is all. It is merely a first step that sets up the work to follow. And it is the writing and discussion that follows that makes the difference, not learning terms. I think the same could be said about sentence combining and other activities. They often don't carry over into better writing and require deliberate attention to application. My concern about the contemporary practice that discourages grammar instruction but recognizes the importance of understanding complex structures is that it withholds the knowledge that students need to make sense of complex structures. It seems to ask us to teach more advanced concepts, such as appositives or past participles, without students knowing the parts of speech and other basic concepts. That knowledge is not sufficient, but is necessary. Bypassing basic grammar seems to go against the idea of sequenced instruction. Again, I agree with the general thrust of your work and with the idea here that helping students understand complex sentences is useful in many ways. The question, as always, is how to go about doing that. There is much more to say about this. One last question: are you saying that we should not teach the parts of speech?
I may not be able to address all of the points in your comment, but I'll do my best! I do feel it's important to teach grammar, but -- as you say -- I agree with you that rules and parts of speech aren't enough for most students. And I agree with you that grammar terms can provide a valuable common vocabulary for discussing writing.
What we may disagree on is whether it should be a "first step." Maybe for some students, but for others, teaching grammatical terms initially could just make things more confusing--even simple terms like "subject" and "verb." I'm basing this mostly on what I've learned from Judith Hochman. If students are young and/or very inexperienced readers or writers, and they've produced a sentence fragment rather than a complete sentence, it can work best to approach things in a more functional way. If the sentence lacks a verb, for example, the teacher might say, "but what are they DOING?" At some point, of course, teachers should introduce the grammatical terms, but it may not work best to do that initially. It could just produce cognitive overload.
When you talk about teaching "more advanced concepts, such as appositives or past participles," before teaching the parts of speech, I'm not sure whether you're referring to The Writing Revolution or something else. TWR does teach appositives, but it doesn't explicitly teach past participles. In any event, the grammatical terms that are explicitly taught through TWR were chosen for their value as a shared vocabulary that will promote the use of complex syntax. An appositive is a construction that shows up a lot in written language but rarely in oral language, so it makes sense to focus on it. If students know the term, a teacher can say "add an appositive," and students will understand what to do. Other grammatical terms--like "prepositional phrase" -- have less leverage. Students are probably already using prepositional phrases, because they appear a lot in oral language, so why focus on teaching that terminology?
I'm definitely in favor of imparting knowledge, including knowledge of grammar. But I feel we need to focus on the knowledge that's going to be most valuable.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. You addressed my points very well. I want to be clear that I realize that a comment in a post about a larger point or in a footnote does not represent your full thinking on the matter of teaching grammar and is not meant as a definitive statement. Your added thoughts make a lot of sense and go a long way toward clarifying these matters. I'll offer a few additional thoughts, but I am not thinking these questions can be resolved here.
As far as teaching grammar terms as a first step goes, yes, for very young students and struggling learners it might not be effective to start with the terms. We have to keep cognitive load in mind and it is very difficult to teach these terms and have students retain and apply them. But my comment on grammar terms being a first step was not about teaching early elementary students, it was in response to that oft-repeated, bare-bones statement that traditional grammar instruction does not lead to better writing and may do harm. That is the same conclusion reached by the report of Braddock, et al in 1963 and adopted by the National Council of Teachers of English. It is not limited by age group, or experience, or any particular point in the learning process. It is a blanket statement against grammar instruction, including the parts of speech. For teachers, it raises a fundamental question: should we teach grammar, even basic concepts such as the parts of speech, at all? I am glad to hear you say that we should. The questions are how, when, and how much. That moves us forward.
The question of how much grammar to teach raises the second point. I was referring to The Writing Revolution by mentioning appositives, and to David Didau's book Writing Fitness when mentioning past participles. I mentioned both terms as examples of approaches that include advanced grammar concepts but seem to skip the parts of speech. An appositive is a noun phrase. But what is a noun? What is a phrase? A past participle is a verb form that can be used as a different part of speech. One response to the problems caused by the research discrediting grammar instruction is to take a minimalist approach and teach a select few terms. That seems to be what is happening here. I can see the reasoning behind that. Grammar study quickly gets technical and complicated. We cannot teach everything. But can we say that we understand something well if we do not have the vocabulary to think and talk about it? That is the open question for me.
That is enough for now. I will look at TRW's resources to see how we might introduce the concept of appositives with sufficient explanation. Natalie, I am grateful for your dedicated work on these important matters and am always interested to read your new posts.
This is excellent, thank you.
Do you think syntax might be easier to grasp for children who speak multiple languages? Who might encounter the same syntactic concepts in their two native languages, but expressed differently, and would that make them more salient?
Maybe -- I don't know if there's been any research on that. We do tend to teach grammar more explicitly when we're teaching kids a new language, which might help (if they even still do that!).
I recently purchased the sentence studio to help me tackle grammar and syntax in my intervention groups. It seems promising!
The Studio - Exploring grammatical function and syntax at the sentence level | Science of the Sentence https://share.google/nKVociB3JIQwQkEJ7