I never knew you have been tortured with this in your early years:
To be perfectly honest, I am one of those rare students (like Florey) who enjoyed diagramming sentences. It's just that I don't think it helped me to be a better writer.
Somebody, somewhere , mentioned that we are being exposed to a lot more perishable writing because of technology (i.e., the Internet). There is an interesting book in my library, sitting near to the peevers' shelves, written by Charles Frees, an American linguist, called American English Grammar: The Grammatical Structure of Present-Day American English With Especial Reference to Social Differences or Class Dialects (1940). He uses as corpus files of informal correspondence of the US government. His is perhaps one of the first attempts at writing a descriptive grammar of General American English. As you might imagine, he found plenty of examples of where the actual grammar of GAE differs significantly from that prescribed by the peevers.
