author

Alonzo Reed

d. 1899

Best remembered as the co-creator of the Reed–Kellogg approach to sentence diagramming, this 19th-century educator helped shape the way generations of students learned English grammar. His classroom-minded books were written to make language study practical, clear, and useful.

2 Audiobooks

Higher Lessons in English: A work on English grammar and composition

Higher Lessons in English: A work on English grammar and composition

by Brainerd Kellogg, Alonzo Reed

Graded Lessons in English

Graded Lessons in English

by Brainerd Kellogg, Alonzo Reed

About the author

Alonzo Reed was an American educator and grammar writer whose best-known work was created with Brainerd Kellogg. Their school texts, including Graded Lessons in English and Higher Lessons in English, became widely known in English teaching and are still associated with the sentence-diagramming method that bears their names.

Contemporary editions of Higher Lessons in English describe Reed as a former instructor in English grammar at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. The books were designed for classroom use, with practical, step-by-step lessons in grammar and composition rather than abstract theory.

Some catalog records identify him simply as “Alonzo Reed, d. 1899,” and reliable biographical details beyond his teaching and authorship are hard to confirm from the sources available here. Even so, his influence is easy to trace through the long life of the Reed–Kellogg system in schools and grammar instruction.