Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog (Kitty Burns Florey)

I discovered this little book just last week. And no, it’s not really about a barking dog. The subtitle is The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, which explains why this book became an instant favorite of mine.

If you’ve been paying close attention to Adventures in Editing, you may remember that I loved diagramming sentences in school. Actually, I like diagrams of all kinds: illustrated timelines, scientific illustrations showing how viruses kill, the instructions that came with my futon, you name it. Of course I also like words, and I like putting words together, so when I first learned how to make diagrams showing how words go together—well, let’s just say I was a very happy word nerd.

I’d never wondered about how sentence diagramming got started, and I thank Kitty Burns Florey for teaching me things I never imagined I would want to know. Actually, diagramming began in the nineteenth century, when, says Florey, self-improvement meant learning good grammar, penmanship, and manners, as opposed to repeating affirmations and aligning yourself with the energy of the universe. (For the record, my grammar and manners are pretty good, my penmanship is atrocious, there are a couple of affirmations I find helpful, and my energy is slightly out of whack.)

One of the first forms of diagramming put the words inside little bubbles instead of on those nice straight lines many of us learned in middle school. Honestly, right now I couldn’t diagram a complex sentence to save my life, but I do remember how much I loved making those lines and putting words on them. Putting words in bubbles seems so flighty, so—I was going to say “French” but I think I’ll go with “cartoonish.” I can say with absolute certainty that if the bubbles had caught on in diagramming, diagramming would not have caught on with me.

Do schools still teach sentence diagramming? I don’t know. Florey says diagramming is not as popular as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I was in school in the 1980s and got a healthy dose of diagramming. For years I was convinced that those hours of putting words in their places helped me understand how to write a good sentence, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe the diagramming was merely a reinforcement of the grammar I already knew. Or maybe it was just a new way to play with words. Then again, playing is a great way to learn, isn’t it?

Speaking of playing with words, if you do nothing else with Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, at least take a look at the diagram of a sentence from Monty Python’s “All-England Summarize Proust Competition” (pages 84 and 85). Imagine getting that on a final exam!