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

by Kitty Burns Florey (Author)
Key Phrases: sentence diagramming, diagramming sentences, Gertrude Stein, New York, Miss Peckham (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review
"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

"This book is not a primer; it’s a prize."
—Robert Hartwell Fiske, author of The Dictionary of Disagreeable English

"A wistful, charming and funny ode to a nearly lost art. Those who remember will cheer. Those who don’t will wonder what fun they missed and whether it will be preserved for future generations. All will agree Florey’s passion is infectious and entertaining."
—June Casagrande, author of Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633107
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633107
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #272,510 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!, October 30, 2006

By	T. MacCombie (Amherst, MA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Who would have thought one could write such a funny, and charming, and informative book on sentence diagramming? Kitty Florey weaves her own 6th grade experiences diagramming sentences under the watchful eye of Sister Bernadette, and then reflects on other writers, notably Gertrude Stein, who was passionate about grammar, and even loved diagramming, (who knew?) but then wrote sentences that obeyed her OWN rules and defied grammatical conventions. Florey's tone, throughout this delightful book, is one of spontaneous humor and warmth. She is passionate about language herself, and seeing how language has evolved, with or without the help of diagramming, is a fascinating look at ourselves, our culture, and gives us a clue about what the future may hold for the written and spoken word.

76 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barking for Bernadette, October 27, 2006

By	Michelle Bisson (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a fabulous read: it is brilliant, erudite, easy-to-read, and laugh-out-loud funny. It will teach you all you never even thought to ask about diagramming sentences, but it is about far more than that. Really, it's an exploration of the evolution of the English language, the gap between those of us who MUST speak and write properly and those who say--whatever. Mostly, it'll make you laugh out loud and how many authors can do that? Move over, Lynn Truss and David Sedaris.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a little misleading, but maybe just plain mysterious, June 30, 2007

By	Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this book after hearing an interview with Kitty Burns Florey on NPR. Though diagramming always seemed to me a limited pedagogical form, I was interested to find out more about the methodology and rationale behind the system. The first two chapters of this book provide a lot of that, though in essence the research seems weak, with Burns Florey doing little more than finding the original books where diagramming methods were developed, from the original balloon designs of S.W. Clark (A practical grammar: In which words, phrases, and sentences are classified according to their offices, and their various relations to one another : illustrated by a complete system of diagrams) to her formal focus, Reed and Kellogg's (Higher Lessons in English A work on english grammar and composition). Her overview takes more of a memoir-like bend, relating these ideas to how they affected her in grammar school rather than addressing their applications to writing and language. Her insight into these books feels very thin, and I felt that I could get more about this topic from reading the original source material, since Burns Florey couldn't really offer any insight into the rationales behind these systems.

The later chapters start looking at the styles of other writers and the shortcomings of sentence diagramming. In fact, after a long treatise on Gertrude Stein, who praised diagramming highly yet wrote utterly undiagrammable sentences, Burns Florey concludes by saying, "For many of the world's great literary writers, diagramming would seem to be seriously beside the point." Now, I was mystified as to what the point of the book was anymore. If diagramming was already a lost art, as the author had already brought up from the beginning, then why go into the shortcomings of diagramming? Her point about the fact that a sentence can be utterly nonsensical but diagram well was interesting but does not seem to be taken towards any further insightful conclusions (and this point was not even the author's). If this was a book ultimately about language and its nebulous nature that is naturally resistant to the geometry of diagramming, then Burns Florey doesn't really offer much insight into the nature of language and how it can resist structure. Overall, this reads like a flat overview of diagramming with a little bit of research, but not enough to provide much insight into the schools of controllable vs. uncontrollable language and whether effective language fits this geometry or not (the answer to which being obviously mixed, but Burns Florey does not offer any ideas as to why).

By the end of this book, I felt as though I had been dragged into a conversation (fairer to say monologue) with Kitty Burns Florey and lectured to for a time about a subject she has great interest in. However, by the end of the lecture, I have learned little more than what I knew from the start--that she is greatly interested in diagramming, though I still have no palpable reason why (or, fairer to say, why I should be interested as well). An interesting topic for a book, but Kitty Burns Florey in the end has little to say about it.