Books On Diagramming Sentences

How the 'Harbrace Handbook of English' Changed the Way Americans Learn About ...

FOLLOWING THE RULES: English teachers could save time by simply noting the Harbrace rule number in the column beside an error, like "10a" marked here. This example is from a 10th-grade paper of Brooks Clark circa 1972, entitled “An Autobiographical Sketch.” The teacher was Ferdinand Ruge, who taught at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., for decades.

Yes, that John C. Hodges—the one the campus library is named after. Ask a student studying inside the library who Hodges was or what he did, it’s even odds at best that he or she will know, but Hodges might have liked it that way. “He didn’t want the spotlight or need it,” says his brother-in-law, John Smartt.

In his will, Hodges assigned three-fourths of future royalties from sales of the textbook to a fund that helped pay for UT’s new library in the late 1960s. “It’s the little handbook that built the library,” says Penn State English Professor Cheryl Glenn, who has channeled Hodges’ spirit as coauthor of the past three editions.

More significantly on a national scale, it constructed a model of the English language in the minds of generations of American students. That first . But even he might be surprised to know of its continuing popularity.

So how did this happen? How did an in-house manual from UT’s English Department in the 1920s become the definitive college composition textbook?

The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with pedagogy—and a lot to do with World War II. It also turns out that the history of Harbrace is, in a nutshell, the history of 20th century English education in the United States.

John Cunyus Hodges was born March 15, 1892, in tiny Cotton Valley in northwestern Louisiana, between Shreveport and the Arkansas state line. It was a rural but comfortable childhood.

“His family down in Louisiana was rich,” says Smartt. “He knew he wanted to teach, and they resolved to take care of John.”

At the age of 19, Hodges graduated with a B.A. from Meridian College in Mississippi, and he got his master’s from Tulane a year later. After teaching at Northwestern University in Chicago for three years, Hodges went east to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1918.

He taught briefly at Ohio Wesleyan, just north of Columbus, before joining the UT English Department in 1921. Here, Hodges took over “a moribund program of Freshman English,” according to Kenneth Curry’s history of the department, English at Tennessee.

basmanroselaw: Joesph Epstein On Stanley Fish On Sentences

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