SISTER BERNADETTE’S BARKING DOG

Despite the fact that I correct people’s grammar for a living, I received little formal training on the subject. I remember learning the basics: subjects and objects; nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; first, second, and third person; and the various punctuation marks. Yet I had to figure out pronouns, articles, and clauses on my own; had never heard of a gerund or subjunctive until I took high-school Spanish; and still couldn’t tell you what a nominative absolute is (OK, now that I’ve looked it up, I guess I can). I scored the interview for my first editing job because the publisher was impressed that I correctly used “not only…but also…” in my writing sample, but I’d never been taught that rule, let alone given it a moment’s thought. I absorbed spelling and grammar mostly unconsciously, through my voracious reading, so my recognition of what is right and wrong (or, in this day and age, I suppose I should say “preferred and nonpreferred”) is largely instinctive. As Kitty Burns Florey describes people like me in this book, “The language sticks to them like cat hair to black trousers, and they do things correctly without knowing why.”

So I was curious to read Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, which I hoped would explain this mysterious practice (known only to me from descriptions in historical children’s books and cautionary tales from Catholic-school-educated peers) and shed light on some deficiencies in my education. “Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss,” Florey begins adorably, and then goes on to discuss her own experiences with sentence diagramming (“It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.”), its history, and its uses, with particular attention to the question of whether knowing how to diagram a sentence makes you a better writer or editor, with lots of examples from great literature. Unfortunately, it turns out that many horrible sentences diagram just fine, but Florey argues persuasively that it’s still an interesting and noble tradition. It may not have taught me how to diagram a sentence (Florey explains it cogently, but luckily you don’t need to master it before you can understand the book), but this was a quick, charming, and surprisingly fun read, not least because, in passing, it introduced me to H.G. Wells’s famously awesome quote about the prose of Henry James, which I had somehow missed in all my English-major days: “It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.”