>>7896645

Non-rainbow sentence:

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

>>7896645

"chidings" is a gerund. This sentence is really several clauses connected by punctuation, all of which embellish the singular sentence of "I was glad of it."

I was glad of it, (for) I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons (for) dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John and Georgina Reed.

The subject is "I." It's more useful to diagram grammatical role than part of speech. So in this case, instead of simply saying "glad of it" is an adjective followed by a preposition followed by a pronoun, it is better to say "I (subject) was glad (since was is the verb to be, this phrase "was glad" is called a "predicate adjective over the subject.") of it (you could call "it" an indirect object here).

This is a difficult sentence, If you're into diagramming I would start with shorter sentences and focus on the grammatical role rather than the part of speech. You want a good handle on subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, adverb clauses and gerund/gerundive/verbal noun parts of speech.

>diagramming sentences
You have to be 18 to post on this site.

What do you even get out of doing this?

>>7896645
When did articles get renamed to "determiners"?

why don't you actually diagram it? it's much easier to understand visually than just colors.

>>7896728

At first I was thinking it was something similar to parenthetical expression, but having
to refer back to "I was glad of it" for each clause really makes a lot of sense now that you've
illustrated it.

I will need to work on the grammatical roles. Thank you for you your help, it was very useful.

>>7896772

I'm interested in writing in English, and in order to do that I must understand how sentences like
these work on the underlying level. It's easy enough to read this sentence and understand the
content of it, but it's a bit harder to pick apart how the sentence works grammatically (to me
anyway).

>>7896645
>two colons in a single sentence

I've never seen this done by someone respectable before. What's up with that?

>>7896744
>diagramming sentences

Is this an American thing? I've never heard of it or seen it done before, yet your comment implies that this is a common task for school-aged children to perform.

I'm not sure I'd be able to do what OP is doing very easily as I've received no formal education in syntax. My understanding of what is or is not grammatically correct in relation to syntax, is, I suppose, more 'intuitive'.

Is there a benefit to doing this? If so, where should I start? Are there any good resources?

>>7896864
It's not an american thing, ir was a common practice within medieval/Jesuistic latinist education.

>>7896864
I was made to diagram sentences in the early 2000s at Catholic school, but kids straight-up don't learn grammar in school anymore.

>>7896864
Not sure I've seen a double colon before either. It is fine as long as both are preceded by complete statements. Definitely rare.

Also I vaguely remember doing these sorts of things in grade school, but just identifying nouns/adjectives/prepositions does not help much. It is much better to think about how each word operates in the sentence (is this noun a subject or an object? Which noun does this objective refer to?)

When I learned Latin we would do something similar to OP where we would sort out grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative). In Latin these were usually very distinct just by looking at the word and distinguishing each case made translation much easier.

>>7896645
Articles are adjectives you schmuck.

>>7896645
never is an adverb
coming is a verb

>>7896864

In writing all rules may be occasionally broken. A good writer should be aware of convention and respect it, but shouldn't revere it or be restricted by it.

In fact, grammar is maybe an attempt to wrangle what is often messy, spotted and chaotic into neat bins. The categorizations and rules only go so far: language pours and flows and often behaves badly, though there is some general gist worth studying.

>>7896780
articles, demonstratives, quantifiers are all determiners.

>>7896645
you are confused. First of all, if you want to consider this all one sentence, then you have to separate it into three paratactic conjuncts.
>I was glad of it.
>I never like long walks, especially on chilly afternoons.
>dreadful to me was...