Reviews & replies: The good, the bad, and the WTF

Shisaiga wrote:

Wait, wait, wait... you think in pictures? Really? Can you please explain that to me? An ex-boyfriend once said he thought in images, as an excuse for why he couldn't remember conversations properly or something, and I always thought he was either talking out of his ass or crazy or something. I mean, sure, I can picture something in my mind, but it's not the default setting. How would you even picture something like the word "sentence" for example? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

I should have explained that better. I don't reason in pictures, but I imagine in pictures, or rather movie sequences. Say in my story Magneto is walking along a corridor: I have the scene before my mental eyes and can tell you where the light comes from, what's the noise of his footsteps etc. All this then is translated into

The Unoriginal wrote:

Magneto strode along the corridor

and I omit more or less details depending on whether it's important or just a linking paragraph from one scene to another. Same if I read someone else's "Magneto strode along the corridor": I add the lighting, noise, background music myself.

A friend who told me one particularly disgusting joke and had to suffer my reaction said that 'women are disgusted by dirty jokes because they picture the scene, whereas for guys it's just abstract concepts interacting"
(My take on it was that it was no wonder pussy was an abstract concept to guys who'd find that joke amusing)
Possibly it's one of those right brain/left brain issues?

I cannot picture a word like 'sentence', it's too abstract - a grammatical cypher. But other concepts such as 'verdict', 'October', 'flutter', 'chilling', evoke a tribunal hall, yellowed leaves, tailplanes on a jet and shivers, respectively. Does this make it any clearer?

Shisaiga wrote:

InkWeaver wrote:

I consider myself a visual thinker, and when I think of someone I love, it's like one big picture of all the things I love about them, associated with an all-over good feeling, uh...

Okay, I don't really know how to explain it, on second thought.

But... isn't that too much to think of all at once? I mean, if you have all of that at once in your "picture", how can you even think about anything else at the same time? How do you think about two people, or three together? Isn't that really bothersome and, I don't know, stuffed full and difficult?

And how about abstract concepts? Like freedom or justice? How can you even picture those?

Oh, and I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone here, I'm just really, honestly confused and trying to understand this.

To be fair, this isn´t an either/or-situation. I'm pretty much a verbal thinker: whenever I read books, my mind rarely translates descriptions to a visual image. It's why I never say "God, I'd have never pictured him as..." when the actors of a novel-to-movie are announced, because I've never mentally built up any sort of notion of what these characters should look like. However, this doesn't mean I can't conjure up visual images, or think of some things in purely visual ways. My tendency is to keep concepts in words, however.
I'd imagine it's the same way for the visual thinkers. They are inclined to think in images, but some things remain in words. I'm not sure abstract concepts are really limited to remaining in words: freedom, for example, can summon some very strong visual images. I think it's harder, however, to remain visual when you're structuring your thoughts: concepts like opposition, cause/effect or even enumeration are more easily put into thought when you can make use of words like 'but', 'because' and 'firstly... secondly...'.

Also: when I announced thinking in words in this class I took, most people didn't really understand. I think the visual thinking is actually more predominant than the verbal thinking. (Hm. This would actually make a cool research-subject.)

The Unoriginal wrote:

Shisaiga wrote:

Wait, wait, wait... you think in pictures? Really? Can you please explain that to me? An ex-boyfriend once said he thought in images, as an excuse for why he couldn't remember conversations properly or something, and I always thought he was either talking out of his ass or crazy or something. I mean, sure, I can picture something in my mind, but it's not the default setting. How would you even picture something like the word "sentence" for example? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

I should have explained that better. I don't reason in pictures, but I imagine in pictures, or rather movie sequences. Say in my story Magneto is walking along a corridor: I have the scene before my mental eyes and can tell you where the light comes from, what's the noise of his footsteps etc. All this then is translated into

The Unoriginal wrote:

Magneto strode along the corridor

and I omit more or less details depending on whether it's important or just a linking paragraph from one scene to another. Same if I read someone else's "Magneto strode along the corridor": I add the lighting, noise, background music myself.

A friend who told me one particularly disgusting joke and had to suffer my reaction said that 'women are disgusted by dirty jokes because they picture the scene, whereas for guys it's just abstract concepts interacting"
(My take on it was that it was no wonder pussy was an abstract concept to guys who'd find that joke amusing)
Possibly it's one of those right brain/left brain issues?

I cannot picture a word like 'sentence', it's too abstract - a grammatical cypher. But other concepts such as 'verdict', 'October', 'flutter', 'chilling', evoke a tribunal hall, yellowed leaves, tailplanes on a jet and shivers, respectively. Does this make it any clearer?

So what do you do with that word? And with others that are too abstract for you to picture them? Do you just ignore them? Or have pictures in your head, and a few words sitting among them? Or do you think in words, when you have to include those abstract concepts?

For me, I imagine in images, with some words mixed in depending on the situation (like, sometimes my brain will spit out some florid description to go along with what I'm imagining), and beyond that, concepts. A word like "sentence" would lead to a concept. I know what a sentence is, but it doesn't need to be in my head as an image or a word.

And I don't imagine visually word-by-word, either. It's not like I'll be reading a sentence like "The boy chases after the dog, bouncing a green rubber ball" and see "boy" "running" "dog" "bouncing" "green" "rubber" "ball" in a row. It's a scenario. I picture that image like a movie (although in less detail; for example, in this particular example I didn't imagine the boy with any particular hair color, although he is wearing a blue-and-yellow striped shirt )

If I get distracted while reading, it can be difficult for me to get back into it because I have to settle into my visualization again rather than just seeing words on a page. I honestly can't fathom not having some sort of image in one's mind while reading, because my brain doesn't work like that at all.

This is fascinating.

Shisaiga wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

Shisaiga wrote:

Wait, wait, wait... you think in pictures? Really? Can you please explain that to me? An ex-boyfriend once said he thought in images, as an excuse for why he couldn't remember conversations properly or something, and I always thought he was either talking out of his ass or crazy or something. I mean, sure, I can picture something in my mind, but it's not the default setting. How would you even picture something like the word "sentence" for example? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

I should have explained that better. I don't reason in pictures, but I imagine in pictures, or rather movie sequences. Say in my story Magneto is walking along a corridor: I have the scene before my mental eyes and can tell you where the light comes from, what's the noise of his footsteps etc. All this then is translated into

The Unoriginal wrote:

Magneto strode along the corridor

and I omit more or less details depending on whether it's important or just a linking paragraph from one scene to another. Same if I read someone else's "Magneto strode along the corridor": I add the lighting, noise, background music myself.

A friend who told me one particularly disgusting joke and had to suffer my reaction said that 'women are disgusted by dirty jokes because they picture the scene, whereas for guys it's just abstract concepts interacting"
(My take on it was that it was no wonder pussy was an abstract concept to guys who'd find that joke amusing)
Possibly it's one of those right brain/left brain issues?

I cannot picture a word like 'sentence', it's too abstract - a grammatical cypher. But other concepts such as 'verdict', 'October', 'flutter', 'chilling', evoke a tribunal hall, yellowed leaves, tailplanes on a jet and shivers, respectively. Does this make it any clearer?

So what do you do with that word? And with others that are too abstract for you to picture them? Do you just ignore them? Or have pictures in your head, and a few words sitting among them? Or do you think in words, when you have to include those abstract concepts?

For me they just kind of just are there. I know when they are in there. They are included in the picture just like in a movie.You don't have a narrator in a movie telling everything out. They just exists in there.

It's soooooo hard to explain. Dammit.

Miss Prince wrote:

For me, I imagine in images, with some words mixed in depending on the situation (like, sometimes my brain will spit out some florid description to go along with what I'm imagining), and beyond that, concepts. A word like "sentence" would lead to a concept. I know what a sentence is, but it doesn't need to be in my head as an image or a word.

Then how do you discuss grammar? In school for example, when someone builds a sentence wrong, how do you think about that? For that, the word or concept "sentence" does need to be in your head somehow, no?

Shisaiga wrote:

Miss Prince wrote:

For me, I imagine in images, with some words mixed in depending on the situation (like, sometimes my brain will spit out some florid description to go along with what I'm imagining), and beyond that, concepts. A word like "sentence" would lead to a concept. I know what a sentence is, but it doesn't need to be in my head as an image or a word.

Then how do you discuss grammar? In school for example, when someone builds a sentence wrong, how do you think about that? For that, the word or concept "sentence" does need to be in your head somehow, no?

Well maybe that's why I suck at grammar and with this I mean both English and Finnish

Shisaiga wrote:

Sarin wrote:

Shisaiga wrote:

Wait, wait, wait... you think in pictures? Really? Can you please explain that to me? An ex-boyfriend once said he thought in images, as an excuse for why he couldn't remember conversations properly or something, and I always thought he was either talking out of his ass or crazy or something. I mean, sure, I can picture something in my mind, but it's not the default setting. How would you even picture something like the word "sentence" for example? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

To give a couple examples: when you remember a movie, I'm guessing you remember mainly the script, and when you're going somewhere, you navigate by the street names; people who think in images remember mainly the mise en scène (no idea if I'm using that term correctly, btw) of the movie, and the landmarks around the turns they need to make to reach their destination (and usually suck with the street names).

What does mise en scène mean? It makes sense to remember the pictures as pictures, but what about the dialog? Do they remember the dialog as dialog or as pictures?

Mise en scène means, like, the visual tableaux that comprise the film. And visual thinkers do remember the dialogue as dialogue, but it's not nearly as easily recalled as the visual aspect - while the latter comes naturally, they have to prod and dig at the memories a little more for the former, and sometimes they can't recall more than the gist of it then. And when they're thinking of a story they want to write out, the mental images will come long before they think of how to put them into words.

Shisaiga wrote:

So what do you do with that word? And with others that are too abstract for you to picture them? Do you just ignore them? Or have pictures in your head, and a few words sitting among them? Or do you think in words, when you have to include those abstract concepts?

This is quite interesting, first because I never sat down trying to analyse how I think, and second because I thought everyone did the same.
You have to realise that words rarely stand alone, unless you're a guinea pig in a psychological test and they ask you 'what does this word make you think of'. I'd have a hard time coming up with images for 'sentence' unless it means 'decision by a judge', in which case the picture pretty much paints itself.
Anyway, remember, this mostly happens to me when reading fiction. In that case I'm more likely to come across

Quote :

"I think we're in..."

He never completed the sentence: a sudden gust of wind from the broken window blew off the candles and the room plunged into darkness.

which is easier to translate into sight and sound, right?
It's a bit hard to explain but some words are actually translated into images, some are modifiers for those same images. In the above example, 'sentence' would fall into the second category in that it does not stand on its own: it refers to the line of dialogue (which I just 'hear' as if the character was speaking in my ear) but simply tells me that the line of dialogue remained unfinished.
The modifiers are visualised, just not on their own: the above I would imagine as "NEVERFINISHED!"I think we're in...", BROKEN!window, BLOWN!candle, SUDDEN!darkness"

A simpler example:

Quote :

The sodium lights were on

The concept I actually visualise here is 'lights'. The other words are just modifiers and tell me to see glowing lamps ('on') emitting orange light rather than white ('sodium'), but I don't visualise soda pellets or anything else - that would be clutter and mercifully my mind does not do that to me. I'd think of something sodium-related if it was the centerpiece of the sentence, e.g.

Quote :

The main economic resource of Deneb VI are its vast sodium deposits

But now I have questions for you (and all the other verbal thinkers): if you don't 'see' the action taking place, what do you make of passages in which the description evokes a mood such as,

Quote :

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard in the City, a cock crowed.
Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the
morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

?

The Unoriginal wrote:

But now I have questions for you (and all the other verbal thinkers): if you don't 'see' the action taking place, what do you make of passages in which the description evokes a mood such as,

Quote :

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard in the City, a cock crowed.
Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the
morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

?

For me, they just stay words. They get absorbed in my brain, sure ´nough, but there´s no translation to anything visual or auditory. If I put my brain to work and actively try to conjure up a complete ´image´, I can get the visual. I get a city, I get a dingy little courtyard, mostly in shadow, and I can get the cockle-doodle-doo. However, I stress that I have to work for this. If I just read it, the sentence arrives in my head as it is, without any adjustment.

Shisaiga wrote:

Miss Prince wrote:

For me, I imagine in images, with some words mixed in depending on the situation (like, sometimes my brain will spit out some florid description to go along with what I'm imagining), and beyond that, concepts. A word like "sentence" would lead to a concept. I know what a sentence is, but it doesn't need to be in my head as an image or a word.

Then how do you discuss grammar? In school for example, when someone builds a sentence wrong, how do you think about that? For that, the word or concept "sentence" does need to be in your head somehow, no?

At the cost of repeating myself: that does not happen to me when I am reasoning. Now I am debating this images vs. words thing and mostly I just 'hear' the sentences I'm typing, same as probably you are. It's when I read or write description pieces that the projector lights up.

You'll probably find this just as cumbersome, but rather than remembering the grammar rules, I run the sentence against a database of bits and pieces of phrases (I think this mostly happens with my native language, with English a bit less) so when someone makes a mistake, it's like they struck a false note: I know something's wrong but I don't know why... all I can offer is, "Look, most people don't say this, they say that".
After I spent a fortnight in England, I switched from saying "I haven't got" (the form taught at school) to "I don't have". Simply, I had heard the locals saying "I don't have" so many times that the corresponding meme had replaced its alternate version, even though I still remembered the grammar.

Jay/Cris wrote:

For me, they just stay words. They get absorbed in my brain, sure ´nough, but there´s no translation to anything visual or auditory. If I put my brain to work and actively try to conjure up a complete ´image´, I can get the visual. I get a city, I get a dingy little courtyard, mostly in shadow, and I can get the cockle-doodle-doo. However, I stress that I have to work for this. If I just read it, the sentence arrives in my head as it is, without any adjustment.

Thank you. Of course the following question would be, "And do you like reading?"
Please don't take this badly: it's just that for me reading would be a dull experience if I couldn't 'see' the story as I go along.

Also, when reading instructions of course I visualise the instrument/system I'm going to work upon. If that doesn't happen to you, what is the path your minf follow to execute, for example,

Quote :

Turn the instrument upside down and locate the middle panel and insert a flat headed screwdriver in the rectangular slot. Then hold it in position as you unscrew the supporting arm from the other side of the mounting plate.

?

You guys are doing a better job of explaining this than I was earlier, so to answer a question a few posts back, by Shisaiga I think - no, it's not exhausting, really, because it's just the way I think. It's not really a... practiced thing. It just sort of happens.

The Unoriginal wrote:

Jay/Cris wrote:

For me, they just stay words. They get absorbed in my brain, sure ´nough, but there´s no translation to anything visual or auditory. If I put my brain to work and actively try to conjure up a complete ´image´, I can get the visual. I get a city, I get a dingy little courtyard, mostly in shadow, and I can get the cockle-doodle-doo. However, I stress that I have to work for this. If I just read it, the sentence arrives in my head as it is, without any adjustment.

Thank you. Of course the following question would be, "And do you like reading?"
Please don't take this badly: it's just that for me reading would be a dull experience if I couldn't 'see' the story as I go along.

Hee. I'm a Lit. Major. My large, extended and somewhat crazy family doesn't take it badly when I crack open a book when I'm bored at a huge family gathering. I read while waiting in line for some stamps. To say that I like reading would be severely understressing it.

The Unoriginal wrote:

Also, when reading instructions of course I visualise the instrument/system I'm going to work upon. If that doesn't happen to you, what is the path your mind follows to execute, for example,

Quote :

Turn the instrument upside down and locate the middle panel and insert a flat headed screwdriver in the rectangular slot. Then hold it in position as you unscrew the supporting arm from the other side of the mounting plate.

?

Hm. I keep 'glossing' over it: while I'd imagine it'd be easier to make the jump to the visual thoughts, I don't necessarily do it. (Even if I put my mind to it, it all remains sort of abstract. In my head, the instrument is two large, square boxes that can be joined together. This, of course, isn't helped by the fact that I have absolutely no clue what a 'mounting plate' is.) If I happened upon these things in real life, I'd probably have the instrument in my hands while reading, and going along with the instructions as I'm reading them.

Jay/Cris wrote:

Hee. I'm a Lit. Major. My large, extended and somewhat crazy family doesn't take it badly when I crack open a book when I'm bored at a huge family gathering. I read while waiting in line for some stamps. To say that I like reading would be severely understressing it.

It would seem to me that you're attracted by the language/words themselves, then. Just to state the obvious, isn't diversity fascinating?
And it's all going to be moot in a few billion years when the Sun will charbroil the old mudball. What a pity.

Shisaiga wrote:

Then how do you discuss grammar? In school for example, when someone builds a sentence wrong, how do you think about that? For that, the word or concept "sentence" does need to be in your head somehow, no?

When I think about sentence structure, I think of it in terms of the function(s) each word in the sentence performs, and the order in which those words are expected to be encountered, not just sequentially but back and forth over multiple words. For example, if I were complaining to you about some people and said "They're always screwing that sort of thing...", you'd expect an 'up' even though 'screwing' by itself has a meaning.

The technical words -- clauses, tenses, propositions -- are tools and labels used to explain how information is communicated, or not communicated. If I were correcting someone about their sentence construction, I'd talk about what information their sentence conveyed and use as much linguistic jargon as they understood. That wouldn't be because a concept's label had more meaning than its explanation or definition, but because one-word labelling nouns are easier to manipulate within a sentence than even short explanations and can be used together in a sentence without that sentence becoming incredibly long and unwieldy.

I don't consciously have the concept "sentence" in my head any more than I do the concepts "the" or "five". It's just a thing whose only use is to talk more easily about other things.

InkWeaver wrote:

It's kind of amazing that Delcat ever found me in Michigan. Even with Mapquest, I'm incomprehensible with directions. I think I told her the blue cabin on the left, and then I realized there were three blue cabins before mine.

Solution to mystery: We got really lost in Deliverance country for a good half-hour and finally found the cabin with a foxy lady waving on the porch<3

ETA:

Sutremaine wrote:

I wonder how fanbrats would take a fic that starts with the
insanity/normality of random mpreg and descends into a David Lynch
fever dream. If a world is home to men who play seahorse and go through
pregnancy, would it really be so odd for people to, say, shed their
skin periodically as they grow, or to mate by hanging off trees and
then turning their sex organs out of their bodies and twirling them
around like fluorescent parasols?

Oh, Sutremaine, I am so glad you made it here.

The Unoriginal wrote:

Shisaiga wrote:

Then how do you discuss grammar? In school for example, when someone builds a sentence wrong, how do you think about that? For that, the word or concept "sentence" does need to be in your head somehow, no?

(...)when someone makes a mistake, it's like they struck a false note: I know something's wrong but I don't know why... all I can offer is, "Look, most people don't say this, they say that".

This. The sentence feels wrong. I have a rough grasp of grammar rules in my own language, so I can back it up, but in English I mostly get a clear feeling that it's off. It's like looking at a picture where the perspective is all fucked up.

I mostly think in feelings. My response to things is emotional, and then I go and try around with words until they fit that feeling.
Runner-up is visual thinking; I find it easy to find something in a book because I remember if it was on the left or right page, top/middle/bottom, as an image. In highschool I remembered vocabulary by remembering where in the page the word was and then mentally "reading" the translation off the page in my head.
It also helps with remembering numbers; if I'm not entirely sure I try around until the numer looks right.


The only exception is when I read or write posts/ letters/ etc, then I hear the words in my head as I read them. That means that sometimes a sentence ends differently from what I expected, and then I have to go back and read it again with the emphasis in different places, and stuff.

I think in sentences, but to the extent that... I know that it's really really weird, but say for example a ball was coming towards me, and I went to catch it. I'd think "a ball is coming towards Seule. She goes to catch it." Only... I think much more descriptively than that...

It's like I have constant narration in my head. I always thought that everyone thinks like that, until I tried to describe it to my mum and she looked at me like I was nuts.

Even my memories, I don't remember things visually or whatever - I remember them like... if I try to remember one holiday I went on as a young child, I remember "I felt sick, so I ate lots of ice cream. The hotel we stayed in was tall and rectangular, like a shoebox turned on its side. There was a pool, but I didn't like to swim in it because there were too many other people there."

I can't remember what the hotel etc actually looked like or how I felt beyond the 'description' of it I have in my head.

grmblfjx wrote:

Runner-up is visual thinking; I find it easy to find something in a book because I remember if it was on the left or right page, top/middle/bottom, as an image. In highschool I remembered vocabulary by remembering where in the page the word was and then mentally "reading" the translation off the page in my head.

I do that too, to an extent, especially when memorizing lists of things.

Delcat wrote:

Oh, Sutremaine, I am so glad you made it here.

Oh, just propose to me already.

Seule wrote:

It's like I have constant narration in my head. I always thought that everyone thinks like that, until I tried to describe it to my mum and she looked at me like I was nuts.

I get that sometimes, although most of the time the narrator in my head would rather talk to itself and sing songs than bother with me. Sometimes it's a distraction, although sometimes it can generate killer prose. Generally it saves this honour for times when I have no access to writing tools.

Quote :

I can't remember what the hotel etc actually looked like or how I felt beyond the 'description' of it I have in my head.

I dunno, that sounds like having a memory of a memory to me. You want to remember something, so you bring up the bits that describe it the best, and after a while the description sort of takes on a quality of its own so you remember the description instead of the memory and then the memory itself fades away from lack of use.

This is a really interesting discussion. I'm also amused by the fact that Cris and I are in the same field of study, but approach it in totally different ways. I like literature that allows me to see in my mind how the story goes. I think in terms of scenes.

I had a great prof who would let me, in place of conventional term papers, "stage" literature. All the aspects of how I think it would look on stage, turn it into dialogue, costumes, set design, blocking, character descriptions, the whole deal. The entire thing would end up being about twice as long as a term paper, but the idea of "seeing" literature like this makes so much more sense to me that it's worth it.

But I'll also go from thinking in scenes to the running narration, like Seule said.

Sutremaine, I wonder if you'd be the sort of person who'd prefer "phrase structure tree" diagramming, a form that lets the person diagramming to see more clearly the way the words connect with one another, to the standard Reed-Kellogg, which doesn't, in my opinion, offer much in the way of clarity. (Plus, PST makes for a nice little upside-down tree when you're all done. Very artsy.)

The Unoriginal wrote:

Thank you. Of course the following question would be, "And do you like reading?"
Please don't take this badly: it's just that for me reading would be a dull experience if I couldn't 'see' the story as I go along.

Oh, but seeing a movie can be boring too, even if you see the story?

I guess I think visually as well as verbally, though, it's just that unless I put effort into it, the pictures are really diffuse. To think clearly, it's much easier to think in words as well. (On the other hand, I draw, so I have to put some effort into visualizing at times too).

So I'm wondering, do you all see it clearly when you think in pictures?

Lurv wrote:

So I'm wondering, do you all see it clearly when you think in pictures?

For me, absolutely not. Assuming we're talking about reading a passage in a book... I can summon details when the book mentions them, and some things I fill in automatically (like who's on the left or right side of the bed, for example, so if I got it wrong initially it can throw me off), but I don't fill in EVERYTHING, and I don't focus on everything at once. This is actually why I can read and enjoy smut about, say, anime characters: when I picture the bodies, they're real, but when I think of the faces, they're the way they look in the anime -- drawn. But I don't get WTF FREAKY HED IZ PAESTED ON YAY mental images because I either focus on one or the other or blur the details. It sounds complicated, but it's very natural for me.

I think primarily visually, with auditory complementation. I can even run an entire episode of a TV program in my head by memory. This is how I compose stories.

Now, whether the images are clear, depends on whether or not I have a headache or am really tired.

I can't imagine someone -not- being able to think visually.

lemmingwriter wrote:

Sutremaine, I wonder if you'd be the sort of person who'd prefer "phrase structure tree" diagramming, a form that lets the person diagramming to see more clearly the way the words connect with one another, to the standard Reed-Kellogg, which doesn't, in my opinion, offer much in the way of clarity.

I had a look at sentence diagramming a long time ago and decided that learning all the notation wouldn't be of much use to me. Anybody who already knew it wouldn't need me to explain it, anybody who didn't would need an explanation in plain English anyway, and I was confident that I could break down a sentence in my head.

The way I mentally diagram a sentence is to gradually isolate and remove the least important elements, with importance being judged somewhat by context. It falls down a little with auxiliary verbs because 'to be having' and 'to have had' and other multi-word constructions get treated as a single element where 'to be saying' and 'to have said' don't, but it's fine for talking about English to speakers of English.

If I had to diagram a sentence on paper to explain it to someone, it would probably end up looking something like a musical score. The subject, verb, and object would be hanging out in the base clef, while the ornamental adjectives added just to make the sentence flow better would be flitting around in a realm accessible only to dogs.