This Is a Book of Sentence Diagrams A Journey Through the Sharpest, Strangest, and Most Stirring Lines Ever Constructed

Unleash your inner grammar geek! A perfect gift for word nerds and language lovers, This Is a Book of Sentence Diagrams uses the simplicity of the classic sentence diagram to unpack iconic quotes from books, films, speeches, and beyond, revealing the surprising relationships between words.

Sentence diagramming might sound like something from a fussy grammar assignment, but you'll find no red pens here. Instead, this book is a visual celebration of the relationships between words. This witty collection features dozens of unforgettable one-liners, from blockbuster films and famous speeches to Shakespearean zingers, classic novels, and philosophical musings. 

Each diagram turns a familiar sentence into a little work of visual art by mapping out the nouns, verbs, and clauses to reveal unexpected symmetry and glorious grammatical chaos. Some quotes, like Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” land like a javelin. Others spiral upward like a tower of tinker toys held together with linguistic duct tape. If you love the inner workings of language, you’ll find joy (and a few laughs) in seeing well-known lines stripped down and displayed across the page in all their syntactic glory.

Man Martin holds an MFA from Kennesaw State University and a PhD in Creative Writing and is the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip "Sibling Revelry." He is the author of three award-winning novels—Days of the Endless Corvette, Paradise Dogs, and The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome—each of which earned him the Georgia Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association. Martin’s fiction has been praised as “brilliant” (Booklist) and “hilarious” (Kirkus), and his shorter works have appeared in The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, Atlanta magazine, Carve, Thuglit, Pleiades, and other publications. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.