Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences Book

What a delightful book. If you ever loved diagramming sentences, as I did, you must read it.

As a sixth grader in Morris Plains Borough School, I was taught how to diagram sentences by Mr. Ed Borneman. He was an irascible man who ruled his classroom like a tyrant. After each quiz or test, he rearranged the seating chart according to the grade you received. Students with the lowest grades sat in front (so as to be squarely within his zone of psychological terror) while top scorers chilled in the back. This was 1968, when you could actually get away with this sort of insanity. He never hit us, but often acted as if he wanted to. One day, Mr. Borneman screamed at me: "Gabrielson! Do you know what you are? You are blase!" I had no idea what blase meant but knew it could not be complimentary. And of course, he was right. I was blase to the bone.

For all of his oddities as an educator, Mr. Borneman at heart was a man who took his job very seriously. He insisted that we diagram sentences. He showed us how to do it and demanded that we get it right. I enjoyed this enormously. I was an indifferent student, and didn't care much for the lessons of my teachers. But diagramming sentences was different. It was stimulating, challenging, something that I took pride in doing successfully. I can also say categorically that it was only through this exercise that I came to understand for the first time how the parts of speech functioned in a sentence.

Diagramming, much like handwriting itself, is a lost skill. Sadly, there are very, very few teachers of middle school grammar who bother to teach it at all today. It is not a silver bullet in the English classroom and -- let's be honest -- will not necessarily make anyone a better writer. Still, it has definite pedagogical merit because it uses a visual schema to map out the way words function on a syntactic level and how meaning is created thereby. Would a competent math teacher talk about circles or polygons in the abstract without drawing one on the board? Could a lesson on the parts of a flower -- pistils, stamens, et alia -- have any meaning whatsoever without an appropriate picture with labels? For young language learners, creating a diagram of how a sentence works is a brilliant solution to the basic problem faced by so many youngsters of trying to grasp what words -- or better, how words mean.

I don't know where Mr. Borneman is these days, but I wish I could thank him for what he taught me. I am quite sure that diagramming sentences was the first step in a language learning process that culminated in my becoming a teacher of Greek and Latin.