Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

by Kitty Burns Florey

Paperback, 2007

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I got this recommendation from rebeccanyc, and picked up a used copy at a local bookshop. It’s an engaging history of how diagramming sentences came to be so in vogue in American grammar schools. I was intrigued by the topic because I distinctly remember having to diagram sentences around the

fourth or fifth grade, and I remember really liking it. It appeals to my sense of order and slotting things into their appropriate places. My memory of exactly how to diagram has faded, however, and I had hoped this book would fill in the gaps. It didn’t really do that, because there isn’t much detail about the nuts and bolts of diagramming. That was a disappointment but overall I’m happy to know more about how diagramming sentences came to be. Florey peppers the book liberally with very engaging side notes about authors like Gertrude Stein and others whose prose is virtually impossible to diagram. Having only read a little bit of Stein, I’d have to agree on that point!

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Once wildly popular and used by teachers across America to teach grammar, sentence diagramming is now a lost art to most people. But from the moment she encountered it in the seventh-grade classroom of Sister Bernadette, Kitty Burns Florey was fascinated by the bizarre method of mapping the words in a sentence. Now a veteran copyeditor, Florey studies the practice in a funny look back at its odd history, its elegant method, and its rich, ongoing possibilities--from its birth at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, to a consideration of how it works, to a revealing look at some of literature's most famous sentences in diagram. Along the way, Florey explores the importance of good grammar and answers some of language lovers' most pressing questions: Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your life better? And what's Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?--From publisher description.… (more)