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There is something that has been bothering me for some time and that I just haven't been able to figure out. And that is whether it can be grammatically correct to only use "am" as opposed to "I am" or "I'm" if an "I" precedes the pharse earlier in the sentence.
Example: "I catch on quite quickly and am not dumb either". as opposed to "I catch on quite quickly and I'm not dumb either".
Thanks,
Timo
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Back in the "olden days" when people knew how to diagram sentences, there was a way to diagram the one suggested. In it, the pronoun appears where the subject of the sentence always goes, then the line branches into upper and lower tiers. The top one includes the words "catch on quite quickly" and the bottom one includes the words "(am) not dumb either" and there is a little dotted line which connects the upper and the lower on which the word "and" is written.
Does anybody remember diagramming sentences? Or am I revealing myself as the prehistoric man?
PS: Welcome, Timo. Don't be a stranger.
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well, i am not prehistoric, and quite young.. (i havent't been 47 too many years, more than 1, but not an unreasonalbe number!, when i compare myself to people who self define themselves as geezers!
and i learned sentence diagraming in school.
but i will admit, when i transfered from a catholic HS to a public HS (mid term), and entered the english class and was called onto name the parts of speech in a sentence on the board, i diagramed it.. and the teacher looked at me, and at the work, and said, "Helen has done a fine job, and it perfectly correct, though i realize none of you understand her process, how about you, XXX, can you come up and label the parts of speech?"
(and so i learned that not everyone diagramed sentences.. and i used older, out of style method)
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When I learned that the public schools had no intention of teaching my children to diagram a sentence -- nor to teach them anything much about "parts of speech" either -- I took matters into my own hands and became responsible for this part of their education. Although they were a bit grumpy at the time, they have since learned that (1) one cannot talk about language without knowing the names of its parts and (2) one can more easuly acquire another language if one has a better sense of how one's own operates. And they both write wonderfully.
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When I learned that the public schools had no intention of teaching my children to diagram a sentence -- nor to teach them anything much about "parts of speech" either -- What, did someone decide there was a *technique that would completely eliminated the need to understand these structures...? 
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It is entirely possible to be graduated from the public schools in this state without knowing the difference between a noun and a verb. The ability to express one's feelings has trumped the necessity of doing so in a coherent, ordered, logical, intelligible fashion. Harrumph!
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I have always considered three things I learned in high school to have been more important by far than anything else I ever learned (well except in Ms. Letourneau's class perhaps.)
And I am pretty much unable to rank them, so this is merely a list, not a ranking:
typing
diagramming sentences
Latin.
All three of these come in handy every day of my life, and while I don't actually diagram sentences the rigorous instruction and analysis involved come into play constantly. Everything I read I read critically, and diagramming helps me to understand what the writer was trying to say, even if he wasn't too sure how to put a sentence together.
Thanks to parsing I can build complex sentences with complete confidence that my thoughts get put onto paper properly and confidently. If I fail to communicate it's because the thoughts weren't coherent!
TEd
TEd
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ASK MR. LANGUAGE PERSON
Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence.
A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech, such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc.
— Dave Barry
(Yes, we know. "Would of bit" is an unacceptable spelling of "would have bitten," but Mr. Language Person is not very bright and to change his spelling would be just plain sic.)
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Timol:
Where are my manners?
First, welcome. We're an odd bunch here, as you've probably noticed, and we tend to grab bits of things and chew on them as we dash madly about on cotangents, which is a sort of explanation of why we're suddenly talking parsing rather than phrasing.
Secondly, either construction is perfectly OK. A maven who gets little discussion on this board, one James J. Kilpatrick, often discusses in his columns questions such as the one you have raised. He espouses watching for the sonorous linkages within a sentence, and would probably counsel you that, while grammatically correct, the usage of two short a's in successive syllables (and am) does not fall trippingly off the tongue.
I'd agree with him.
TEd
TEd
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