Tidy little sentences

Anyone who knows me knows my passion for organization.

So it would come as no surprise that as a child, I LOVED diagramming sentences. (We called it "parsing.")

Oh, the joy of it - all those little lines!

A place for every word and every word in its place.

So I was delighted to come across Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey.


There's the simple little sentence:

The dog barked.

Then we get more complicated:

Mildred is a good dog but maybe she needs obedience school or some plain old-fashioned discipline.

THEN, hold onto your hats....check out this one:

I must make myself strong for the knocks that are to come, for no matter what you tell me something in me says that life for me holds more knocks than joys, and the blows will leave me crushed, stunned, wild-eyed and ready to die, while the joys will make me deliriously, wildly, gloriously happy.