Sister Bernadette's barking dog

the long version

Once wildly popular and used by teachers across America to teach grammar, sentence diagramming is now a lost art to most people. But from the moment she encountered it in the seventh-grade classroom of Sister Bernadette, Kitty Burns Florey was fascinated by the bizarre method of mapping the words in a sentence. Now a veteran copyeditor, Florey studies the practice in a funny look back at its odd history, its elegant method, and its rich, ongoing possibilities--from 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. Along the way, Florey explores the importance of good grammar and answers some of language lovers' most pressing questions: Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your life better? And what's Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?--From publisher description.