How in the world to diagram this!

[TheParser]

On the "Ask a Teacher" forum, there is a raging battle (OK, it's not that fierce) about how to interpret a sentence something like this:

Nowadays traveling to foreign countries is often like watching TV, channel surfing through a bombardment of images too fast to understand them.

Would you please Reed-Kellogg this sentence? The teachers do not agree as to the grammatical role of "channel surfing ... understand them."

Thanks a million.

[Frank Antonson]

On the "Ask a Teacher" forum, there is a raging battle (OK, it's not that fierce) about how to interpret a sentence something like this:

Nowadays traveling to foreign countries is often like watching TV, channel surfing through a bombardment of images too fast to understand them.

Would you please Reed-Kellogg this sentence? The teachers do not agree as to the grammatical role of "channel surfing ... understand them."

Thanks a million.

That sentence does not appear hard to me. I would supply either the word "and" or the word "that is" and then treat "watching" and "channel surfing" either as two items in a compound object of a preposition, or else the second one as an appositive in that object of a preposition.

[TheParser]

That sentence does not appear hard to me. I would supply either the word "and" or the word "that is" and then treat "watching" and "channel surfing" either as two items in a compound object of a preposition, or else the second one as an appositive in that object of a preposition.

Brilliant idea to treat the comma as a substitute for "and."

Reed-Kellogg rocks!

[Frank Antonson]

Yes it does.

In about another week I am going to begin to ease my online students into the art.

Frank