Diagram This!

Ashley, Ben, Colby, Destiny, Shevlyn, and Tyler have accepted the challenge of diagramming more complex sentences. They have begun by diagramming compound subjects, compound verbs, gerunds, present participles, past participles, appositives, and understood prepositions. Presumably, they can diagram every sentence in this carefully composed post!

1. Playing and dancing with my son Angus this morning exhausted me and energized him.
(Steve Benton, Diagram This!, first page)

2. “At a distance he can see the tall line of a dozen or more aqueduct arches, commencing suddenly, suddenly ending; coming now from nowhere, now going nowhere.” (James Gould Cozzens, Morning Noon and Night, last page)

3. “Stealing watermelons on dark and rainy nights was a pious duty when I was a boy.” (Donald Day, Uncle Sam’s Uncle Josh, 5)

4. “Repudiated, embraced, attributed, claimed, it turns up everywhere, changing shape with the times.” (Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom, XI)

5. “Emboldened by his father’s reaction to Zhivago, Sergei produced Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle and Cancer Ward and George Orwell’s 1984.”
(William Taubman, Krushchev, 628) That's Kruschev, without feathers, in the image at left.

With the exception of the first example, these sentences come from Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2006).