Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey

I think I first noticed this book, subtitled, "The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences" on my favorite book blog: The Millions. The book is delightful - it's 8x6, thin, and cleanly formatted and illustrated. I don't usually notice the design of the books I read but this was hard to miss. It's worth a trip over to Google Books to see a sample page.

Florey's book reads like a long essay - I could imagine this being in the New Yorker in a few segments. It was a mix of literary history, her personal story, details about diagramming sentences, and a little social commentary thrown in. I had always enjoyed diagramming sentences in school (it was like math during English) and it was interesting to read the history of how and why it was invented.

I encountered a few laugh-out-loud moments (which reminded me to put Bill Bryson's books on my reading list - I was once on a flight with someone reading Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and she laughed uproariously for the entire flight) but mostly just enjoyed the writing. She spent a long chapter discussing what famous writers may have covered in school vis a vis diagramming and how it may have impacted their style - James, Stein, Twain, Cooper, Proust, and Oates to name a few. I was surprised how shockingly out-of-date her irreverent references to George W. Bush seemed.

The penultimate chapter was the only one that seemed out of place to me. As a copy editor, Florey encounters many grammatical errors. In this chapter, she enumerates her least favorite ("ain't", double negatives, and "youse"), weakly connecting this to the rest of the book by considering whether diagramming these errors would make it obvious they were wrong. While I appreciate a discussion of grammatical errors as much as the next logophile, I didn't think it fit with the rest of the book.

That criticism aside, this was a quick, likable, and memorable read.