List Books » Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences
Authors: Kitty Burns Florey
ISBN-13: 9781933633107, ISBN-10: 1933633107
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Date Published: October 2006
Edition: (Non-applicable)
KITTY BURNS FLOREY, a veteran copyeditor, is the author of nine novels and many short stories and essays. A longtime Brooklyn resident, she now divides her time between central Connecticut and upstate New York with her husband, Ron Savage.
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." Now, in this offbeat history, 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, from grumpy grammarians and crossword-puzzle aficionados to students of literature and lovers of language.
Contents
1 ENTER THE DOG
17 TIMES CHANGE
35 GENERAL RULES
61 POETRY & GRAMMAR
103 YOUSE AIN’T GOT NO CLASS
125 DIAGRAMMING REDUX
147 Afterword
151 acknowledgments