"In honor of Presidents Day, I thought I'd return to the 'lost art' of diagramming - last practiced (by me) in the Seventh Grade classroom of Mrs. Brenda Wooten - to see what I could learn about the mind of President Barack Obama."
"The diagram, though, offers several insights. First, the elegant balance of the central construction (My view is that x, and that y, but also that z) shows that Obama has a good memory for where he's been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he's going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.) The third "that" - thrown in 29 words into a 43-word sentence - creates three parallel predicate nouns. And then there's a little parallel flourish at the end: "I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.""
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