For the pure geek of it, I challenged you to diagram a sentence from Mississippi State Senator Hob Bryan. He was arguing that Mississippi has passed plenty of laws against abortion already (update: another coming — more on the show tonight). Ahem:
What we have not done is to pass bill after bill after bill that was obviously unconstitutional just so we could all get on record one more time as casting another vote realizing that what was going to happen was someone would file suit the next day and the legislation would never take effect.
I’m from Mississippi, and I’m used to the way people talk there, and I do love diagramming sentences, but that particular string of words struck me as really quite hard to batten down. Below, the hand-drawn work of Sally Carter from Georgia:
Chris Fisher of Long Beach, California, sends another, after the jump, with this note: “Not sure if this is correct, but I used the help of the Reed-Kellogg Diagrammer (free online) to do it. Completed the job by breaking it up into pairs of clauses to find their relationships and adding needed commas. Enjoy!”
The place for in-depth analysis, commentary and informed perspectives. Recommended
