My mind usually goes blank the moment Joy asks, “So what do you want for Hanukah / Christmas / your birthday?” Then reminders keep popping up when all the present-shopping has been done. Just now, an article someone posted on Facebook reminded me that I have been wanting a book about how to diagram sentences. This way of teaching grammar is recalled by a few people fondly, and by most as an archaic torture device, like an oubliette, but for me it is only an artifact of times long past. It didn’t even appear in unused chapters of our grammar books, as far as I can recall; I encountered it in whichever of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books she passes her teacher’s exam (Little Town on the Prairie, I think).
Being visually inclined, I thought it looked kind of cool. I don’t know if I would really have learned grammar any more easily with such a concrete, spatial analogue of parts of speech, but I would almost certainly have found it interesting. My daughter (also a visual thinker) agrees it would be fun to see how it’s done.
So I told Joy just now that I want a book on how to diagram sentences. She advised me to go look for one myself, as she wouldn’t know where to start. So I hied over to AbeBooks, used books being preferable to new in most cases, and the very first item that popped up in my search was by a woman I know. Well, I knew her when I was a little girl; she and her then-husband were longtime friends of my parents. Both couples have since split up and I haven’t seen her in years, but she is a novelist, and her daughter, whose wedding I officiated, and I are friends on Facebook. (The daughter is not the person who posted the aforementioned article.) Her book is actually a history of sentence diagramming as well, and I think it sounds fascinating.
So, Kitty Burns Florey, I have ordered a copy of your book, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, and I can’t wait to read it.
Sermons in Stones 
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December 18, 2018 at 6:19 am
affirmandpromote
Ok that is a case of coincidence taking a creepy turn.
Along the gramer interest line. I was surprised to find a few years back that the orton Gillingham approach to learning english spelling and grammar for dyslexics essentially differs from other approaches by breaking everything down to 200+ rules that involve distinguishing latin verses greek and norse roots to get a grasp of some things but does in the end show their rules that lie underneath it all. In contrast to the standard approach taken in schools where we generally throw books at kids quiz them on vocabulary and hope for the best.
And in my own experience I got so much out of Latin classes growing up though never was able to translate anything but they had that systematic approach that often involves learning the English rules of use as a precondition for grasping what was going on in latin (and of course we continue to see the impact of Latin grammar schools and the posh adoption of latin grammar conventions into the way we use english as with the whole “to boldly go where noone has gone before” (completely functional and clear use of english vs “”Boldly to go where noone before which has gon” which is I think what latin would demand grammatically).
My point not being that through Latin study I mastered grammar but that I remember it seemed a lot more comprehensible. I have looked for some sort of free adult version online and not found anything.
But I thought of it because 1) I remember doing sentence diagrams in grade school and then again in Latin class where the teacher used it to illustrate the ways in which word order is used differently to impact meaning in the two languages
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December 19, 2018 at 4:35 am
Kim Cooper
OMG! I want a copy too!
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December 19, 2018 at 10:20 am
Karen Skold
Hey, what good news! I learned how to diagram sentences in elementary school in the 50s, and it was very interesting to see how sentence structure worked. I can’t remember how to do it any more, but I’m glad you have that book.
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December 31, 2018 at 8:41 am
David Zucker
I learned diagramming from middle schoo through high school. I was appalled to find my students at the college level didn’t even know what it was.
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