Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

It's wonderful to meet, though just through writing, someone who had as much fun diagramming sentences as I did. If only she had enjoyed parsing sentences and conjugating verbs as much :-). The author had excellent control of her material as she went through her memories, the history of the diagrams and the delightfully convoluted sentences from a variety of writers. Only twice did I want to question her. First, for her definition of parsing which left out all the fun - mood, tense, person, number; second, for her dismissal of the tree diagrams used by linguists where she ignored their main advantage - going down to the smallest level of meaning e.g. -ed noted as a past tense marked on walked. Moving past the nit-picking, which as a copy editor the author implied she would enjoy, I only became bored/willing to set the book down in the final chapter - the "survey" of the use of diagramming in today's classrooms and what diagramming actually teaches one.

I definately recommend this book to anyone who loved to diagram sentences.

This short book is a pleasant memoir of a time when many people learned sentence diagramming and, to be honest, more of the rigors of grammar. In the author's case, she clearly recalls teacher Sister Bernadette and the pleasure diagramming brought both of them. I put this on my list after an interview with Ms. Florey refreshed my own fond memories of something logical and detailed that appealed to me as a future engineer who likes to write.

We learn some about the history of diagramming and its predecessors, with a mix of specific examples largely taken from literature. The literary references (Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, etc.) allow her to tell various stories about the famous authors and shift into various riffs on English in general, such as "ain't". Those musings are interesting enough and move right along, but the net result is that I learned very little from the book.

I really wanted a modest refresher of diagramming basics in this book. Maybe 5-10 pages would have done the trick. There certainly was room. I studied the examples, thinking about how I would have done them myself or why they were done this way or that (e.g., oh, yes, that's a participle, isn't it, so it's written in that arc). For that reason, I will disagree slightly with Ms. Florey's statement that you don't learn grammar from diagramming. Perhaps diagramming forces you to think about what parts of speech those funky phrases are. The author credits Gene Moutoux for the complex diagrams, and his web site indeed has a nice introductory tutorial.

She gets full credit for pointing out weaknesses in diagramming, most notably that bad English and bad grammar often diagram just as well as the good stuff.

Even as someone who is no fan of George W. Bush, I can do without cracks about him in this type of book. The little dig against "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" fits better.

3.5 stars, rounded down

I didn't expect to like this book. I am an English teacher, and the topic of grammar brings out the hectoring schoolmarm in every otherwise rational adult I encounter, even the ones who insist in inserting apostrophes where they aren't intended to go (why is it that the most vicious and authoritarian grammar cops invariably make so many basic errors?) Sentence diagramming, according to the research, is not associated with any improvement in writing or reading whatsoever, yet colleagues insist on recommending it to me as a worthy undertaking. I'm beginning to get surly at the slightest mention.

Yet this book (which acknowledges the underlying lack of utility of sentence diagramming) managed to charm me with its frank fondness for an activity Florey admits is not necessarily useful. That I can understand. To find out that Gertrude Stein adored sentence diagramming appeals to my quixotic side. I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys language.

Kitty Burns Florey, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (Melville House, 2006)

When I was in eighth grade, I feared English class. Odd for someone whose life's goal was to be a writer, eh? But walking into that room clutching Warriner's English Grammar and Composition like a buckler and a No. 2 pencil as a sword was like entering the Circus Maximus. Why? Eighth grade was the year we were introduced to diagramming sentences. It's the English teacher's equivalent of geometry, and for someone who's not math-minded, it's a terrifying experience. This feeling was unanimous in my classmates, and whenever I've brought up the subject of diagramming sentences in the (far too) many years since then, it's always been greeted with facial expressions ranging from disgust to post-traumatic stress disorder. I had rather thought the hatred and fear of diagramming was universal.

Not so. Kitty Burns Florey loved it, when she was in school. After reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, I have to say that if I'd had an English teacher who approached diagramming as Sister Bernadette did, I'd probably have gotten out of eighth grade with far less mental anguish than I actually did. Florey traces the (quirky, natch) history of diagramming whilst giving us a picture of how it was used when she was in school-- as a game, a way to break up the monotony of learning one's spelling words and parts of speech. Good stuff, that, and certainly more fun than opening one's Warriner's and finding that one's assignment for the night was to diagram an entire page of Henry James. (Okay, I exaggerate. But still. Florey diagrams a single sentence of James at one point in the book, and it's about as complex as the complete Tudor family tree.)

I've always been a fan of history books that illuminate some odd little forgotten corner of history, and so I'd have been predisposed to like this even if Florey hadn't approached her subject in such an accessible manner. But the book is short, readable, and (dare I say it?) fun. Even if you hated diagramming sentences (and I'm still not convinced anyone but Kitty Burns Florey ever actually liked it), this is a good'un. ****

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.

Kitty Burns Florey has written a book about the English language that is witty, charming, educational, and impossible to put down. "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog" should be in every high school, and first year college English classroom. Literature and creative writing majors run to the bookstore and pick up a copy. Strunk and White move over. You have a new companion on the bookshelf.

I just finished reading _Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences_, a book about sentence diagramming. By "art" she refers to beauty and not a system of principles and methods, and by "about" I mean surrounding not on the subject of. The book is rather short and recalls the author's happy childhood, gladly diagramming sentences in front of class. She talks about its history, its future, its admirers, its uses, and its failings. The one thing missing from the book, the one thing that I was really hoping for, is a good tutorial on how to diagram sentences. Oh well, I guess that's why we have the Internet.

"Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss." Thus begins Kitty Burns Florey in _Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences_ (Melville House), a funny little history, personal and social, of what would seem to be one of the dullest topics imaginable: not only grammar, but also a defunct pedagogical tool formerly inflicted on grade schoolers. And yet, Florey (now an author and copyeditor) thought that diagramming sentences was fun, and still thinks so, and even if, having finished this book, you don't start diagramming them for yourself, you will understand what the draw was, is, and could still be. After all, a half century ago, when Florey was in the sixth grade and being taught diagramming by Sister Bernadette, diagramming was a lark. She admits, "I'm not really sure why what was mostly considered a lark half a century ago is considered dull today." It's not dull in this book, though. "You took a sentence," Florey writes, "threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences." She makes it sound like fun, and it is.

Sister Bernadette, a teacher Florey remembers fondly, would start off with a simple sentence, from which the title of the book comes, "The dog barked," which of course is the first diagram in the book (there are plenty). "Dog" and "barked" are on the horizontal foundation line, separated by a vertical line that extends through the foundation, and the modifier "The" is on a diagonal below and attached to the line beneath "dog". "That was it," writes Florey, "subject, predicate, and the little modifying article that civilized the sentence - all of it made into a picture that was every bit as clear and informative as an actual portrait of a beagle in mid-woof." In the 1860's the pedagogues Alonzo Reed and Brainard "Brainy" Kellogg pioneered the system taught in succeeding decades. Generations of English teachers taught that diagramming sentences would improve one's writing. The problem was that many bad sentences diagram just fine. Noam Chomsky, using the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" showed that nonsense can be perfectly grammatical, and indeed it diagrams just fine. I never would have guessed that Gertrude Stein was an enthusiast. She wrote, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." Florey admits that Gertrude Stein, for all her enthusiasm, usually wrote sentences that cannot be diagrammed, and gives a sampling, along with Stein's remarks disdaining question marks and commas while pledging fidelity to periods.

Florey does believe that despite all contemporary evidence to the contrary, "... clarity in speech and precision and consistency in writing will never cease to be important.... when we communicate better, we understand each other, and ... when we understand each other, life in general is greatly improved." Diagramming sentences has potential to help us understand how sentences are put together and understand the logical functions of words, and may help us write more correctly. But does it make us better writers? "I'm convinced," Florey admits, "that diagramming was no help to me at all as a writer." Perhaps, but she also says, "Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail." That's not a bad attitude for students to develop, and it is well conveyed in the prose within Florey's friendly and amusing book.