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

Kitty Burns Florey,Kitty Burns Florey
Publisher: Harper Perennial
November 05 2007
EAN: 9780156034432
ISBN: 0156034433

Items marked as WAREHOUSE may take additional time to be delivered to your address or picked up in the store.

Synopsis: A delightfully offbeat history of the art and science of sentence diagramming by a veteran copyeditor and writer. Grumpy grammarians, crossword-puzzle aficionados, and lovers of language will appreciate this book.

In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked."

Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them. Along the way, Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers.