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.