The Business Writing Club — Building Blocks

What a syntactic tree looks like

Every sentence has a grammatical structure that linguists can diagram as a tree. Click any node to see what it covers. We won’t be going here — but it’s useful to know it exists.

Click any node to explore the structure
S PP NP VP P NP N V NP N VP RelCl V NP Rel VP
Select a node above to see what it means.
S — sentence
PP — prepositional phrase
NP — noun phrase
VP — verb phrase
RelCl — relative clause
Leaves

This is what professional grammarians use to map sentence structure. You can see why we’re not teaching it. What we are teaching — actors, actions, cognitive load, structure — achieves the same clarity without the notation.