I was fortunate to have a few teachers old enough to remember sentence diagramming, and I got a taste of it in the sixth grade. Most people are not so fortunate, as it has been out of fashion in the world of education for at least about 50 years from what I can tell. Memorization, drills, and parsing sentences was replaced with loosey-goosey teaching and an unfortunate obsession with free verse poetry, most of which—let’s admit it—is terrible.
The revival of “classical education” has brought a renewed interest in the logic of English and the precise use of words. With it comes memorizing definitions for the parts of speech and learning to identify them in the wild. Susan Wise Bauer, the woman behind the Well-Trained Mind empire, has a penchant for sentence diagramming and writes about it with captivating intensity.
With the revival of grammatical precision, my own children have dipped a toe into the world of parsing sentences and laying out each word on a carefully contrived, tree-like web of horizontal and oblique lines. If that doesn’t sound immediately exciting and appealing to every young learner, you would be correct!
Our shared experience of sentence diagramming was enhanced by the discovery of “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences” a 2006 book by Kitty Burns Florey. I find it hard to believe the book was successfully published as it is seems such a niche interest. But grateful I am that it made it to press!
Burns Florey recounts her memories of diagramming in the classroom of yesteryear and the contagious enthusiasm of St. Bernadette that inspired her students to delve ever deeper into the organization of language. Burns Florey also covers the little-known history of sentence diagramming, arising as it did in the 19th-century craze for personal betterment and refinement.
What makes sentence diagramming particularly appealing, perhaps, is the ability to assign each word a specific job in the sentence. No word or phrase is left untouched, but each, when diagrammed successfully, will be pinned to the logical subject and predicate of a sentence, no matter how complex or meandering is the thought. Of course, the greatest fun comes with diagramming your own sentences, the longer and more elaborate, the better.
The English language is both chaos, as documented in this delightful poem, and logic and order. Learning to enjoy both aspects means that you will never lack for entertainment. Collecting words with absurd spellings or pronunciations, studying the jobs of various words and learning to identify them, both are hobbies that can be passionately pursued with nothing more than a public library card and an inquisitive mind.
Now, on to the next stumbling block to complete verbal enjoyment: At least one child in the house has a decided lack of attention to penmanship. After the success of “Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog” I found myself longing for a book about the history of handwriting. Would you believe Kitty Burns Florey has just that? Next for casual study and enjoyment will be the author’s nonfiction work, “Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.” The fun really doesn’t end!
