I was in the woods in the Upper Delaware Valley getting a grammar lesson. Why was I partaking in a grammar lesson? I’m not in school. I was learning how to diagram sentences from Lani S., an artist behind Diagrammers Anonymous.

Sentence diagramming is a lost art, and Lani hopes to bring it back to life, as both an art form and as a way to honor grammar. Lani talked about the Grammar Wars, and how grammar has become a way to put people down, or it’s become snobby, and the term “grammar Nazi” is seen all over social media. “It’s not to alienate, it’s to bring together,” Lani, a self-proclaimed Grammar Jedi, says. Lani explained how the Grammar Wars began in the 1970s when schools started to cut grammar lessons from the curriculum (or diminish them), because it made the students feel badly if they couldn’t grasp the difficult grammar concepts.

Lani is also a teacher, and has taught at Delaware Valley Job Corps Center in Callicoon and The Homestead School. It was during her teaching years that she became infatuated with grammar (before that, she worked in the film and music industries in San Francisco and New York City). Her grammar lessons are fun and interactive. She says the kids at the Job Crops would go from rude, or sleeping, or not caring at the beginning of class, to saying at the end, “Thank you for the lesson.” Indeed, when Lani taught me how to sentence diagram I never thought grammar could be so much fun, and I left with a sheet of color-penciled notes.

Most methods of diagramming are based on the work of Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in their book “Higher Lessons in English,” first published in 1877, though the method has been updated with recent understanding of grammar. Reed and Kellogg were preceded, and their work probably informed, by W. S. Clark, who published his “balloon” method of depicting grammar in his 1847 book “A Practical Grammar: In Which Words, Phrases & Sentences are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relationships to Each Another.”

The first thing to know about sentence diagramming is that it’s not easy. It’s a visual representation of the structure of a sentence. Lani describes it as the shape of someone’s language, or a roadmap to their thoughts. “It has a formula, but it also has an x factor. I like that it has a mysterious x.” In the diagram, the sentence is broken down word by word and each word has a particular placement. So, before I learned how to sentence diagram, Lani went over the parts of speech with me: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, etc. (each one has its own color and shape). “You can’t hide from a word,” Lani said. “You have to know what every word is doing. It’s like brain surgery.”

Of course, I won’t (and probably couldn’t) explain how to sentence diagram here. But if you want to learn, Lani mentioned many wonderful resources, including the books “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences” by Kitty Burns Florey, “Drawing Sentences: A Guide to Diagramming” by Eugene Moutoux, “Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy” by Phyllis Davenport, and the documentary “Grammar Revolution” by Elizabeth O’Brien. And for Diagrammers Anonymous, you can email lani@diagrammersanonymous.com. Why is it called Diagrammers Anonymous? Because sentence diagramming is like an addiction, and you need a group to talk to about it. Lani also offers private instruction in grammar and/or diagramming for kids and adults.

All of this informs Lani’s art. A lot of her work is printmaking; she prints sentence diagrams onto tote bags, shirts, note cards, whiskey glasses, rocks and more. Lani calls it grammar ware/wear. She sells these on the website, and the note cards are available at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance gift shop. She also creates “zentence” diagrams such as the saying “chop wood and carry water.”

“Grammar and sentence analysis [diagramming] correlate to an important aspect of living: that it’s not about having the answers, but asking the right questions,” Lani said.

Visit www.diagrammersanonymous.com.