Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

On the long list of Books I Wish I Had Written, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog has just leapt to Number One. SBBD is not, as it sounds, a pet story; it is a paean to the art of diagramming sentences and the beauty of well-constructed prose.

Kitty Burns Florey learned to diagram in Sister Bernadette's sixth grade classroom many years ago, and she loved it. She describes the process fondly: "You took up a sentence, threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences." It's not surprising that she grew up to be a copy editor and a writer whose prose is colorful, elegant, graceful, and funny.

SBBD does not actually teach the reader how to diagram, but it provides enough examples that someone who already knows grammar can figure out the process. (As Florey points out, diagramming doesn't teach grammar; you have to know grammar to do it right.) She does provide an entertaining history of the educational use of the practice sprinkled with humorous stories about her own diagramming days. Her pleasure in the work is described so beautifully that I almost put down the book to try to diagram sentences like these: "I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams—the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which—once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed—those sentences could be comprehended."

The book is full of gorgeous sentences by other writers too, diagrammed for us in the imperfect printing of a human hand on beautifully uneven lines--a surprising visual pleasure in this era of computerized perfection. Trying to read a sentence from its diagram is an interesting exercise, like re-doing a jigsaw puzzle that was complete until someone walked by and bumped the table.

From the specifics of diagramming Florey moves to broader ideas about language and writing. I appreciated her balanced attitude toward correctness: while extolling clarity, precision, and consistency and working "to keep English accurate and well-scrubbed," she recognizes the ever-changing nature of our language and loves its endless variations and idiosyncrasies. She shows the silliness of many of the rules still championed by certain grammar police. Her own rules, she says, would boil down to these: "Communicate. Communicate elegantly. When elegance is beside the point, fuhgeddaboutit."

In her last chapter Florey takes us to a classroom where, absent any nuns and barking dogs, we find middle schoolers happily diagramming. Though she questions whether the practice actually improves writing--she swears it did hers no good--she points out why it can nonetheless be good for adolescents. Unlike writing itself, diagramming "was a game; it wasn't about you. There was no room for opinion. You weren't being judged on the content of your soul or the quality of your imagination.... Brilliant diagramming, unlike brilliant writing, was something that could be learned."

If you are a survivor of Catholic school in the fifties, you will love the afterword, where we learn what happened to Sister Bernadette after that crucial year of diagramming. But you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate this book. You just have to love writing and the struggle to do it well.

You can learn more about the author and her work at http://kittyburnsflorey.com/.