Sister Bernadette's barking dog : the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences / by Kitty Burns Florey.

1933633107 (alk. paper)
9781933633107 (alk. paper)

Hoboken, N.J. : Melville House, c2006.

English

154 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.

PE1375 .F56 2006

428.2

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.

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