My father was a little distressed to learn that diagramming sentences was not a big part of my education. Learning Latin in high school was the best grammar education I ever got. After that, nothing about English (or, later, German and Old/Middle English) ever worried me.

Most kids hated it. But for the kids who loved it, it made language into an orderly puzzle, complicated but solvable, where words clicked into interlocking pairs, groups, and chunks, until a picture of the hidden architecture of sentences emerged. That architecture, when exposed, can be beautiful. It’s no wonder that sentence diagrams have made their way into art. Here are 6 creative uses of sentence diagramming.

Mental Floss.