When we first learned how to diagram sentences back in middle school, it was a total pain in the ass. The exercise was complicated and seemingly superfluous. How useful was scrawling a preposition on a slanted line, anyway? However mind-numbing it might have been, sentence diagramming holds up quite well as an efficient--and oddly beautiful--way to dissect and understand a complex set of data. It is, essentially, information design.
The designers over at Pop Chart Lab saw this too, realizing that the exercise of diagramming sentences isn't far off from what they do on a daily basis. “We're drawn to the idea that breaking down a sequence of sentence constituents into tiny pieces can reveal something larger and infinite about a sequence of words,” says Ben Gibson, Pop Chart’s creative director. “In a way, it's what we do with all of our infographics: Distill data down into finite tiers so as to see some larger form.”
In a new poster, A Diagrammatical Dissertation on Opening Lines of Notable Novels, Pop Chart has dissected and diagrammed the opening lines of 25 famous novels. The infographic is based on the Reed-Kellogg system, which was first introduced in 1877 by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in their book Higher Lessons in English. The Reed-Kellogg method breaks a sentence down to its grammatical components, ultimately making a graphical diagram that is meant to give us deeper understanding and appreciation of words and they way they work together.
It’s fascinating to see iconic opening lines like “Call me Ishmael,” or “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” stripped down to their gears. Though you can bet Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t wracking his brain about where to position his direct object, it’s those individual components that come together to craft what’s ultimately one of the most important and compelling lines of a book.
As Gibson says: “We like to think that there's some overlap between opening lines and good design. At a glance, you can often tell if you want to spend time with a piece of art. It's probably just as important for an author to make their first lines engaging.”
You can buy the 24 x 18-inch poster for $29 here.
