We challenged you to diagram this sentence from Congressman Thaddeus McCotter's resignation letter:
"Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must 'strike another match, go start anew' by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen."
Tough, right? Tough, meet Sally Carter of Georgia (click for bigger):
Also, Elizabeth Beutel of San Francisco, who gives us peek into how she did it (click for bigger):
After the jump, two entries that are all about process.
Lauren Becker of Fullerton, California, with the creative appendix:
And I think this was the first entry, a blueprint for a full diagram, from @bartlebyjbudde:
(How to send us stuff, like these diagrams or pics that make sense of life in your hometown or political mailers or or or....)
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Love it. I would have to pay to have what I write analysed. Good work.
I would be much more impressed by the person who could tell me wtf he is trying to say.
In a nutshell, "I'm outta here.".
He'd rather spend time with loved ones than stay in a mad house [of his own making]...or as any college kid might say, "Mom/Dad, I flunked all my classes and got kicked out of my dorm. Can I have my old room back?"
So English majors end up on "Prairie Home Companion", or read Maddowblog?
I am currently copyediting a magazine article in which every other sentence looks like this.
You poor thing.
i messed up. got caught. getting forced out by new candidate. bye!
Here's a paraphrase based on the instructions given to college first-year writing students on the most correct way to attribute and accurately cite a source without the use of direct quotation in a research paper (according to MLA, they HAVE to do it this way, something that always annoyed me greatly when I HAD to teach it):
First, the original, for reference only.
"Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must 'strike another match, go start anew' by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen."
The paraphrase:
Upon resigning, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (D-MI) said he was extremely sensitive to the difficulty of remaking the fireplace foundation in his house from within a decaying office of a United States' congressperson, although his fond regard for his family means he must start a different fire by wholeheartedly hugging as a career advancement the act of moving from the job of holding public office to having no job at all as a kingly unemployed voter.
Below is a pretty good bit too. The wonder is that he served for 26 years without anyone previously exposing him as an abject idiot, one of those classic types Mark Twain and HL Mencken so loved to parody.
And this:
By applying the Falkner style of sentence diagramming, and I am able to point to a comma error below. The subject of the sentence is "I", but "for the sake of my loved ones" is a parenthetical phrase that is missing a second comma to set it off properly.
But, in spite of the comma error, the introductory adjective phrase is correct (everything before the "I")-- no dangling modifier, a common error with convoluted syntax.
"Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must 'strike another match, go start anew' by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen."
So the Subject, "I" "must strike another match" and "go start anew". The sentence is complete at that point (not a fragment).
The whole last bit, "by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen" is simply a complex prepositional phrase (noun phrase anchored by the gerund "embracing" is the object of the preposition).
So, technically, this isn't even a compound or a complex sentence. It's a simple sentence (one subject, compound verb).
I always loved diagraming in school - this sentence is for the experts - but I think all of my Catholic school teachers are dead. But they are probably doing it - well where ever they are.
He needs to learn how to express himself and not use others material.
I was very, very good at diagramming in the 7th Grade and I loved it. However, even with a gun to my head I couldn't do it today. What is presented is here is boffo work. Good Job!
If you're familiar with the sovereign citizens movement, then you immediately picked up on McCotter's disturbing reference to his "promotion" to "sovereign citizen". If you're unfamiliar with sovereign citizen ideology, learn about it here:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement
I bow to the diagrammers. This is not something I ever enjoyed doing in school. Dissecting frogs, yes, sentences, no.
McCotter's future prospects are 85k a year of pension for life consisting of yours and my money. I'm sure he's also virulently anti-welfare.
Terry Nichols, who was Timothy McVeigh's accomplice, considered himself a member of the Sovereign Citizens Movement.
I loved diagramming in school...but I loved English even more. McCotter's use of "their" when "his" would be the correct word goes right along with his fractured thinking. He said, "...one cannot rebuild THEIR hearth..." "One" of course is not plural, so"their" is incorrect. He offers up that error a couple of times. As does the fellow who tries to make a good impression but has spinach in his teeth, Mr. McCotter has made himself a laughing stock with his pompous and flawed English.