It's all right for words to mean what they say

Eudora Welty:

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, for words to mean what they say. It's all right too for words and appearances to mean more than one thing — ambiguity is a fact of life. But it is not all right, not in good faith, for things not to mean what they say.

From Michael Leddy's Against “deep reading” at Orange Crate Art.

Diagramming sentences

From A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences at NPR:

That reminds me... I was taught diagramming sentences in elementary school -- fifth or sixth grade probably, 1958-1960, certainly not later. Years later, in the late 1970s, I walked past an open college classroom door and overheard a student complain that diagramming sentences was difficult. Stuck in my mind.

From the NPR piece:

"It was a purely American phenomenon," Burns Florey says. "It was invented in Brooklyn, it swept across this country like crazy and became really popular for 50 or 60 years and then began to die away."

By the 1960s, new research dumped criticism on the practice.

"Diagramming sentences ... teaches nothing beyond the ability to diagram," declared the 1960 Encyclopedia of Educational Research.

And this:

Burns Florey says it might still be a good tool for some students. "When you're learning to write well, it helps to understand what the sentence is doing and why it's doing it and how you can improve it."

And this:

"It's like a middle man. You've got a sentence that you're trying to write, so you have to learn to structure that, but also you have to learn to put it on these lines and angles and master that, on top of everything else."

So many students ended up frustrated, viewing the technique "as an intrusion or as an absolutely confusing, crazy thing that they couldn't understand."

I don't know about all that. I'm sure I don't remember, now, how to properly diagram a sentence. But I know it gave me more than just "the ability to diagram". Diagramming sentences helped me read and write and think.

Let me give you an example. In the PDF The Rise and Fall of General Laws of Capitalism, one sentence from Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:

"The distribution of the gains from new technologies were also shaped by an evolving institutional equilibrium."

I run into a sentence like that, I have to read it two or three times to see if I missed a word. No, I didn't drop a word. So I know what the sentence says, and this is how I see it:

I didn't know what to do with the first "The" and the "also" and the last five words, so if you actually know how to diagram a sentence... My apologies.

What I did is simple, really. I just pulled out the prepositional phrases and... adjectives (maybe?)... to reduce the sentence to a simple one:

The distribution were shaped by an equilibrium.

Oh, or it would be a sentence if it was written better:

The distribution was shaped by an equilibrium.

There! You can tell that's a sentence. Of course, it doesn't tell you much. The distribution of what?, you might ask. The distributions of gains? Gains from what?

Sure, and those questions are answered by the two prepositional phrases below the first two words in the sentence diagram graphic.

Anyway, pulling out the words that provide the details that flesh out the sentence, pulling them out allows me to simplify the sentence until it's easy to see whether you need a "was" or a "were" in there.