Brainerd Kellogg

Born in Champlain, New York, in 1834, Brainerd Kellogg became an American educator and writer whose career was closely tied to the teaching of English. He taught at Middlebury College, first as a tutor and then as professor of rhetoric and English literature, before serving for many years as a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.

Kellogg is most closely associated with classroom grammar and composition. Working with Alonzo Reed, he helped develop the Reed–Kellogg system of sentence diagramming, a visual method that became widely known in American schools. He also wrote and co-wrote textbooks on grammar, rhetoric, and the English language that were intended to be clear, practical tools for everyday teaching.

He died in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1920. Today, his name still turns up whenever readers, teachers, or students encounter traditional sentence diagrams, a sign of how lasting his influence on language instruction became.