In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: and "It was a bit like art, a big like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked. and "Now, in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, an offbeat history that any language lover will adore, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them.Along the way, she offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature's 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?