Taught to the Tune of a Hickory Stick

The Facebook friend (he's also a blogger) who'd linked to Kim Brooks's article, sent me e-mail today. Among other things he wrote:I think for example that sentence diagramming of the parts of speech is helpful, up to a point. I think, or at least hope, that my grammar is pretty decent even if I never fully grasped the various definitions of different kinds of participles, and so forth. but as I