chapter 1ENTER THE DOGDiagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. When it was introduced in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like the measles, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue. By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like him and me went and I aint got none, until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.11 Im thinking here of Mark Twains famous and still highly entertaining essay, Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses, in which Twain concludes that in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 literary offenses out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. But Wilkie Collins called Cooper the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America. Even in my own youth, many years after 1877, diagramming was serious business. I learned it in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette. Sister Bernadette: I can still see her, a tiny nun with a sharp pink nose, confidently drawing a dead-straight horizontal line like a highway across the blackboard, flourishing her chalk in the air at the end of it, her veil flipping out behind her as she turned back to the class. We begin, she said, with a straight line. And then, in her firm and saintly script, she put words on the line, a noun and a verbprobably something like dog barked. Between the words she drew a short vertical slash, bisecting the line. Then she drew a roada short country lanethat forked off at an angle under the word dog, and on it she wrote The. That was it: subject, predicate, and the little modifying article that civilized the sentenceall of it made into a picture that was every bit as clear and informative as an actual portrait of a beagle in midwoof. The thrilling part was that this was a picture not of the animal but of the words that stood for the animal and its noises. It was a representation of something that was both concrete (we could hear the words if we said them aloud, and they conveyed an actual event) and abstract (the words were invisible, and their sounds vanished from the air as soon as they were uttered). The diagram was the bridge between a dog and the description of a dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language. I was hooked. So, it seems, were many of my contemporaries. Among the myths that have attached themselves to memories of being educated in the 50s is the notion that activities like diagramming sentences (along with memorizing poems and adding long columns of figures without a calculator) were draggy and monotonous. I thought diagramming w Excerpted from Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
