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The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences
Melville House
October 2006
On Sale: October 1, 2006
200 pages
ISBN: 1933633107
EAN: 9781933633107
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring
of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of
life's smallest details."-Richard Russo, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Once wildly popular and used by grammar teachers across
America, sentence diagramming is now a lost art to most
people. But from the moment she encountered it in the
sixth-grade classroom of Sister Bernadette, Kitty Burns
Florey was fascinated by the bizarre method of mapping the
words in a sentence. Now a novelist and veteran copyeditor, Florey studies the
practice in a charming and funny look back at its odd
history, its elegant method, and its rich, ongoing
possibilities. From a discussion of its birth at the
Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, to a consideration of how
it works, to a revealing look at some of literature's most
famous sentences in diagram, it is a charming and often
inspiring tale. Along the way, Florey explores the importance of good
grammar and answers language lovers' most pressing
questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better
grammarian? Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your
life better? And what's Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?
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