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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?
 Media BuzzMorning Edition - December 12, 2006
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