Can you read this? If you were in elementary school after the 1960s, maybe not.
Chances are, if you went to elementary school before 1970 (or attended a Catholic school before 1985), you remember diagramming sentences. One by one, you would be called up to the board to have your skills and nerve tested. You’d be given a sentence, and all you’d have to do was dissect—right there, immediately, flawlessly—in front of a class full of your peers and the hovering teacher. A ritual of childhood that, it turns out, taught many children only one thing about grammar: to hate it.
However, if you are one of those diagramming-loving freaks, have a long-lost need to revisit sources of pain from your childhood, or just want to kill a few minutes trying to outsmart a computer, you might want to visit the online Kellogg-Reed Diagrammer at http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/
Because this is a computer and not an intelligent being, of course, the program is not difficult to stump. Sometimes failing to insert a comma after an introductory clause or putting too many “cleft” structures in a row (as in “There was a boy who sang”) will result in the message “Cannot find an utterance,” as though you have literally left it speechless. It has lax standards—it will diagram “She pinked the dress,” correctly guessing that “pink” is being used here as a verb, but it will not diagram “After the meeting, it slowly walked away.”
Most often, it will generate multiple potential diagrams for the user—this is a computer, after all. It doesn’t speak English, only binary. When I input the sentence “The boy cried until he finally fell asleep” the parsing program incorrectly identified “fell” as the main verb in its first two offerings; only on the third did it realize that “cried” was the actual beginning of the predicate. And even when the diagrammer gives you many choices, there is no guarantee that any of them are correct. For example, when I typed in “Once upon a time, there was a dragon knitting sweaters for stray dogs, and he opened a yarn store with his friend, a unicorn named Fred,” the website gave me a whopping 24 possible diagrams. None of them were quite right.