Scratching Behind a Sentence's Ears

Taken from The Paris Review

A book about diagramming sentences? How could that be anything but dry? Well, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, by Kitty Florey, is about diagramming sentences and is in fact quite entertaining!

For those of us who learned how to diagram sentences in school (say, anyone over the age of 50), Florey's book brings back memories (good or bad) of wrestling a sentence into that strange grid of lines. I enjoyed the practice, as did many others. Of course, some positively hated it, but even those readers would find this book a delight.

Florey begins with her own introduction to diagramming under the tutelage of Sister Bernadette, her sixth-grade teacher. The little nun's methods made the practice fun for her and other students in her class. She illustrates some of those methods with the type of sentence diagrams she and her classmates were asked to make. But once she entered high school, she laments, it was never mentioned again. She missed it, I think, as did I and other people in my age group who enjoyed taking a sentence apart and then putting it back together, only different. (Mwa ha ha!)

Kitty Florey

The book then goes on to present a history of sentence diagramming, which started back in 1860 with a book by S.W. Clark, Practical Grammar, that introduced balloon-shaped graphics to illustrate the different parts of a sentence. Then in 1877, the leaner, more efficient technique of using lines appeared in a book entitled Higher Lessons in English, by Brainerd Reed and Alonzo Kellogg. It became the bible of sentence diagramming and versions of it were used for decades to teach school children how to bring a sentence to heel.

The remainder of the book discusses the general rules of the practice, with lots of fun examples. There is an entire chapter in which Florey diagrams the sentences of famous writers, which I found quite entertaining. Those of you familiar with Henry James and his gargantuan sentences will especially enjoy the diagrams of his work.

She admits that diagramming sentences doesn't really help students write better or even better understand their language. That was the reason it was eventually abandoned as a general teaching method, after all. But sentence diagramming has made a comeback in recent years, though often for different reasons and with slightly different methods of illustration (tree diagrams, for one). Florey's book was published in 2006, but one can still find plenty of websites that explain and promote the practice.

Florey ends the book with a visit to a contemporary elementary school classroom where the students are learning sentence diagramming. The teacher tells Florey that she teaches diagramming not only to get a better grasp of how sentences are constructed, but also to have fun with words--because it is, after all, fun, especially if presented as a game. And this, Florey believes, is a very good reason for teachers to continue teaching it. As Florey says of her own experience, "Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail" (154).

This was an entertaining and enlightening book. I recommend it highly!

Next on the "F" list: The Caregiving Dilemma, by Nancy Foner.

Missing Someone? Call Rat Dog Dick!

Missing Persons: a writer's guide to finding the lost, the abducted and the escaped, by Fay Faron, was an entertaining and informative book. Part of The Howdunit Series, it is one of a group of books designed to describe the real work of detection in an effort to help murder mystery writers craft their characters and plots more authentically. This particular edition focuses on finding missing persons. The writer is a private investigator who owns an agency memorably titled, Rat Dog Dick Detective Agency. (She explains how she came up with that title in the book.)

Fay Faron

It was published in 1997, so some parts of the book were a bit dated, especially those sections where she outlines the sources of information for finding missing persons. The internet was still in its infancy then, so her research mainly involved using old-fashioned paper sources (egads!), face-to-face interviewing, and actual gumshoe-ing, or searching on foot. (For those of you who wonder, gumshoe refers to shoes that have gum soles and are therefore quiet.)

Despite the subject's being potentially grim, the writer's tone was light and her descriptions witty (what you'd expect from someone who named her agency Rat Dog Dick). Her list of the types of people she was hired to look for was very interesting. People are missing for a variety of reasons, some of them innocent, some not-so-innocent. When she first started looking for missing persons, her specialty was tracking down people who owed money to the court. Once she started her own company, she specialized in finding the missing, whatever the reason. She even worked with the Oprah show on a series of episodes helping people find lost relatives. But she refused to take some cases; if she thought she was going to get "stiffed, stuffed, or scalleywagged," as she put it, she steered clear.

Throughout the book, Faron illustrates her points with stories of some of her cases. They are very entertaining, especially the ones involving scoundrels, a type of missing person. (See the book for her chapter, "The Profile of the Scoundrel.") And not surprisingly, she is working on a mystery novel of her own. I had not heard of her before this, but I plan to check out her other writing.

All in all, a worthwhile read, even if you're not interested in writing mystery novels!

Next: Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, a book about diagramming sentences by Kitty Burns Florey.

At last! Murders!

Portreeve, SK - Prototype of Portreau, town in Canada
taken from Google Maps

Well, I enjoyed reading Canada, by Richard Ford, at least for a while, anyway. If you haven't read this book by now, I wouldn't recommend it, even though it got a glowing review in the New York Times when it first came out.

Right from the beginning, the narrator and also main character, Dell, kept hinting that there were going to be murders in the future. By the time I was two-thirds through the book, I was tired of hearing about those murders, and by the time the murders actually happened, almost at the end, I couldn't care less about the victims. In fact, I wanted to shout "Hallelujah!" when the poor fools were finally dispatched. Sad, I know.

The writer did a good job of developing the protagonist and even some of his fellow characters, but I think Ford broke the cardinal rule of fiction: never make your protagonist passive. As far as I could tell, Dell never did anything to make his situation better in all the time that he was suffering through it. He accepted mutely whatever he was told to do, even to the point of helping with the murders. Dell was a lot like his mother that way. The most active character in the book was Dell's bank robber father, who at least made decisions, even if they were usually the wrong ones.

I have to say that Dell did not deserve to get off with a good life after all he failed to do. The conclusion, therefore, was unsatisfying in a number of ways in that the baddest bad guy got away with murder--three times--and Dell failed to show any character. He wasn't even a very good story teller in that he built up the murder business so much it was anticlimactic when it finally came to pass.

The best part of the book was the description of the parents and what led up to the bank robbery. Once that was over, things were suspenseful for a time while we waited to learn what would be Dell's fate. But he started to get on my nerves when he wouldn't act and just kept going along. Perhaps he inherited that bad brain chemistry his parents seemed to display.

My next reading choice is another "F" book: Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped, by Fay Fanon. It's part of the Howdunit Series, books designed to help murder mystery writers with the various aspects of crime and detection. I own a few others in the series, but this will be the first one I've read.

Stay tuned!