Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog · the Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

A SLATE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A PEOPLE PICK FOR WORD LOVERS 

“Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming has fallen out of fashion. But are we that much worse for not knowing the word-mapping method?

Now, in this illustrated personal history that any language lover will adore, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd “Brainy” Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed ... the inferior “balloon diagram” predecessor ... and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them.

Florey also offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature’s most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? What are the silliest grammar rules? And what’s Gertude Stein got to do with any of it?

"A pleasantly discursive and affectionate tribute to an antiquated art. Ms. Florey closes with a levelheaded assessment of diagramming, listing its virtues by acknowledging its weaknesses." -- Wall Street Journal

"Diagramming sentences may have gone the way of the slide ruler, but this charming little book makes deconstruction of language fun." -- Chicago Tribune

"Florey writes with verve about the nuns who taught her to render the English language as a mess of slanted lines, explains how diagrams work, and traces the bizarre history of the men who invented this odd pedagogical tool... It's a great read." -- Slate

"Kitty Burns Florey always liked diagramming sentences, she says, and nobody who reads Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog will presume to doubt her. Subtitled `The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences,' the book is a nostalgia trip to the '50s, fondly evoking a sixth-grade class learning to wrestle syntax into the framework of the Reed-Kellogg system." -- Boston Globe

"This gem from copyeditor Florey is a bracing ode to grammar: it's laced with a survivor's nostalgia for classrooms ruled by knuckle-cracking nuns who knew their participles." -- People Magazine

Kitty Burns Florey, a veteran copyeditor, is the author of nine novels and many short stories and essays. A longtime Brooklyn resident, she now divides her time between central Connecticut and upstate New York with her husband, Ron Savage.