"Frits Staal has shown convincingly that it is heuristically fruitful to consider the ways in which rituals are organised as analogous to the syntactic structures of language. In addition to the theoretical and methodological concerns regarding considering rituals to have a syntactic structure analogous to that of sentences, Staal's work on ritual has initiated a technique of diagramming the structure of rituals. Just as syntactic studies of language have benefited from the development of the now widely used techniques of diagramming sentences, so also ritual studies can benefit from a consistently used diagramming technique."

-- Richard K. Payne, The Shingon Ajikan: Diagrammatic Analysis of Ritual Syntax.