Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

It never occurred to me that a book on sentence diagramming could be an interesting read, but Florey, a copy editor, is not only a terrific writer and charmingly cranky, but she knows her stuff. It's a coffee table or novelty book, something you might find at Urban Outfitters, and has more in common with the 'origins of everyday things' type books than a grammar book. I learned, for instance, that 'finalize' and 'prioritize' are relatively new words; that 'the lion's share' mean ALL of something, not most; that Indian Summer is not just a warm spell in November, but a warm spell that occurs AFTER a hard frost. Witty and engaging to the end.

The book does nothing to help the reader to learn and understand grammar using the diagramming method. If you are interested in learning or brushing up on grammar this book is not for you. There is no connection in the book between grammar and diagramming. It was a waste of money.

These days, if you want to write literature, you can ignore grammar altogether. But if want to write for a living (i.e. to do the kind of blue collar writing required for law, journalism and scholarship) sentence diagramming is one of the two most important tools you can teach yourself (the other is logical argument diagramming - see Sherry and Malone, Inference and Implication: An Introduction to Logical Analysis).

This book goes a long way to place diagramming within an entertaining narrative context. But when the author concedes that grammar is "unsexy" I don't agree...and I don't quite believe her, either. There is something inherently kinky and Freudian about grammar. It attracts authoritarian personalities -the people David Foster Wallace calls 'militant grammarians.' And the students who thrive in grammar always have a streak of masochism. They take secret joy in submitting to grammar's order, cleanliness, and hairsplitting distinctions. And this is especially true of sentence diagramming. Like the Victorian culture that produced it, diagramming is shot-through with a repressed sadomasochistic eroticism.

Florey contends that this cigar is just a cigar. She goes out of her way to explain that Sister Bernadette was a "benevolent" "tiny nun" who didn't indulge in the stereotypical "knuckle-rapping." But perhaps she doth protest too much. Her disussions of forbidden sleepovers at her "raciest" friend's house are suggestive. When she chooses to spend her "exotic day off" diagramming sentences "under the authoritarian thumb" of a public school teacher, my pulse ticks up a notch. For me, anyway, sentence diagramming will always be hot (think Pygmalion, the Story of O, and Secretary).

Of course, to actually teach diagramming this way is legal only in the Scandinavian countries and some remote parts of New Guinea. For the time being, we in the USA must settle for a more sterile pedagogy. And this is the undoubtedly the best book on this topic currently in print.

But it could be sexier.

Not everyone loves or even knows what sentence diagramming is; but for those of us who do and appreciate what it taught us about language, this is a fun discussion of what unfortunately has become a subject relegated to the educational dustbin of the US. Some other countries still make good use of it. This book makes good fodder for for great cocktail party conversation.

I was prepared to like this book, and did for the first 50 pages, but then something happened. First, there were the gratuitous insults directed toward G.W. Bush's speaking style. Criticism of his writing style (or speech writer's style) might have been relevant, but the snide comments about the President's speaking style served just to show that the author had "good" political academic credentials. ("Look at me academia! I hate Bush too! I'm one of you!")

Then, there were the seemingly endless references to Gertrude Stein, one of the more over-rated and annoying authors of the 20th century. If her sentences are not "diagrammable", why include so much information on her?

This leads to the fact that there is little written information in this book on how to diagram a sentence. Instead, the author spends too much time on digressions as noted above. The reader is left to figure out where to place the various words, based on the drawings. Is there a book out there that actually shows you how to diagram sentences in the real world and in the world of classroom teaching?