Book Details

In this illustrated personal history, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd 'Brainy' Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed - the inferior 'balloon diagram' predecessor - and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them. Florey also answers some of literature's most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? What are the silliest grammar rules?