How would I go about diagramming this sentence?:: "Tom's friends were painting the fence for him"

Question

anonymous · Answer

all right, you can start by trying to locate the subject and the predicate...how about start with finding verbs...here "were painting" is the verb. Then we can try to locate the subject: "friends", "Tom's" is an adjective....for is a preposition that introduces a prepositional phrase "for him" which describes how or why the friends "were painting" the fence...."fence" is a direct object that Tom's friends were painting, "the" is a definite article describing the fence, letting you know which fence...