As a new film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey beams onto movie theater screens all around the world, we thought we’d organize this month’s materials around a related set of themes and journeys.

Enjoy.

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn (2017)

Favorite Sentence: “‘Journey of Odysseus’ was an ‘educational’ cruise, and my father, although contemptuous of anything that struck him as being a needless luxury, was a great believer in education.”

—Picked by Chris Kang, Class of 2027 (Countries Visited: 18, including Italy, Belgium, Russia, Norway, Singapore, China, and Morocco)

2. Poetry: Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (1911; translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard 1975)

Favorite Lines:

“wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich”

—Picked by Hayato Shimomizuki, Class of 2027 (Countries Visited: 6, including Australia, England, France, Thailand, and Taiwan)

3. Fiction: Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

Favorite Sentence: “Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel.”

—Picked by Madison Krumins, Class of 2027 (Countries Visited: 31, including Germany, Sweden, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article in Smithsonian Magazine in which Professor Richard Janko, who teaches in the University of Michigan’s Department of Classical Studies, is one of the experts asked to share their views on the origins of The Odyssey.

• Was There Ever an Original Version of The Odyssey? by Ellen Wexler (2026)

  • Sample:

    • “The oldest known records of The Odyssey are papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt, some dating back more than 2,000 years. These early copies are fairly similar to the version today’s readers are familiar with. But because they feature small differences, they’re sometimes described as ‘wild’ or ‘eccentric’ versions of the texts. Some include lines that aren’t present in later established versions, while others omit lines that are. None alter the plot in significant ways.”

    • “Nobody knows when Odysseus’ story started circulating. It began as oral tradition, so its earliest iterations weren’t preserved in the archaeological record. The oldest references to episodes associated with the text are illustrations, such as seventh-century B.C.E. pottery fragments depicting Odysseus blinding the cyclops Polyphemus.”

    • “Based on an analysis of the language [of the poems], Richard Janko, a classicist at the University of Michigan, argues that one poet composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey in the eighth century B.C.E. He’s also skeptical of the idea that the poems were composed gradually over the centuries, as surviving versions vary only in minor ways. ‘I don’t see how something so intricate could have been designed by a committee,’ he says. ‘I think the person who performed this epic was an exceptionally great singer.’ This poet, however, likely couldn’t write. Instead, Janko explains, a scribe recorded the poet’s words, perhaps at the behest of a patron.”

Syllabus Sentences: When I teach my students about asyndeton—a rhetorical move where you intentionally omit a conjunction like “and” or “or” in a list of items—I sometimes use an example from the novel The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, partly so I can sneak in some advice about the value of youthful adventures.

• Reading List for Life (Chapter 7 of The Syntax of Sports, Class 4: Parallel Structure)

  • Sample:

    Prof. Barry: Let’s take a look, for instance, at an example from Jhumpa Lahiri in The Namesake, a novel we talked about on the first day of class. It’s the book where a character remembers some advice his father gave him about traveling.

    Read that advice for us again, Ms. Henrietta. I believe you were the one who read it for us before.

    Ms. Henrietta: “Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”

    Prof. Barry: And now read the example where Lahiri drops the conjunction. It’s from later in that same novel, when the narrator is talking about the power of nicknames—­or what the narrator calls “pet names.”

    Ms. Henrietta: “Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”

    Prof. Barry: Notice the place the conjunction could have gone?

    Ms. Henrietta: Yeah. Right after “so formal.”

    Prof. Barry: Exactly. Lahiri could have written, “a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, and so complicated.”

    Ms. Henrietta: That’s not as good.

    Prof. Barry: I agree. Some of the music of the sentence is lost if you add the conjunction. Which may be why Abraham Lincoln, in the closing part of the Gettysburg Address, decides to go without a conjunction as well. Here’s the section I am talking about.

    Ms. Henrietta: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about odysseys by sea

  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001

    • Sample: “When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”

      

• For good sentences about odysseys by land

  • Tracks by Robyn Davidson (1980)

    • Sample: “I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars, and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes.”

  

• For good sentences about odysseys in space

  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

    • Sample:

      • “Once again I’m struck by melancholy. I want to spend the rest of my life studying Eridian biology! But I have to save humanity first. Stupid humanity. Getting in the way of my hobbies.”

        

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something that can be nice both at the end of a long journey and at the start of a paragraph: a welcome mat.

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Last month, we celebrated the start of the World Cup with some soccer-related materials. This month, we’ll celebrate the start of another major sporting event, the Tour de France on July 4, with some bicycle-related ones.

Enjoy. (And pedal hard!)

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: Gold by Chris Cleave (2012)

Favorite Sentence: “As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions—like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere—when all she’d ever trained it to do was pump blood.”

—Picked by Alexander Maletis, Class of 2026 (Fun Place to Bike: Bogotá, Colombia)

2. Poetry: Going Down Hill on a Bicycle by Henry Charles Beeching (1895)

Photo Credit: “Henry Charles Beeching, 1900s-1910s” (National Portrait Gallery)

Favorite Lines:

“Till, when the wheels scarce crawl,
My feet to the treadles fall.”

—Picked by Kristia Postema, Class of 2026 (Fun Place to Bike: Pentwater, MI)

3. Essay: Meet the Women Who Have Been Building the Cycling Industry All Along by Hannah Gross (2026)

Favorite Sentence: “Even though I am a woman, sometimes we forget the real needs of women, because we are used to serving others.”

—Picked by Samara Kohn, Class of 2026 (Fun Place to Bike: Green Bay Trail in Winnetka, Illinois)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article about a research project led by Professor Dale Ulrich of the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology that explored the benefits of teaching children with Down syndrome to ride a bicycle.

• Kids with Down Syndrome Who Bike Ride Are Less Sedentary Overall (2011)

  • Sample:

    • “Children with Down syndrome who learned to ride a two-wheel bike were less sedentary overall and had less body fat one year after learning to ride compared to those who did not participate.”

    • “Researchers measured participants’ level of physical activity prior to training, at seven weeks and then one year after the camp, and found that kids who learned to ride reduced their sedentary behavior by 75 minutes a day.”

    • “‘That’s a lot. That’s unbelievable. We were not expecting this large of a drop in sedentary activity,’ Ulrich said. ‘It can’t be just because of riding a bike; this means they are getting involved with other activities. They overcome their fear of falling while riding a bike and as a result become more motivated to try other physical activities.’”

Syllabus Sentences: When my students and I are learning about the idea of “social contagion”—which is described in The Handbook of Social Psychology by Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson as “the spread of affect or behavior from one crowd participant to another”—I often use the example of steroid use in baseball and doping in the Tour de France. (The discussion usually builds off the “threshold model of collective behavior” developed by the sociologist Mark Granovetter that I mentioned in last month’s “Syllabus Sentences” section about soccer stadiums and “the wave.”)

• The Wave (Chapter 5 of The Syntax of Sports, Class 7: Information Flow)

  • Sample:

    • Prof. Barry: Maybe we can think of thresholds not just in terms of numbers but also in terms of relationships. The question is not simply “How many players need to start taking steroids before other players start taking steroids?” The question is also “Which players need to start taking steroids before other players, in response, start taking steroids?”

      There are many parallels to this kind of thinking, which might be familiar to anyone who has learned about “social contagion.” But what I want to call our attention to now is how at a certain point the boldness it takes to initiate a social contagion—to be the first one to try something before anyone else—shifts to the boldness it takes to resist a social contagion.

      [So let’s] return to the example of steroid use in sports. This time, though, we’ll focus on the doping scandals that have marred the Tour de France and other cycling events.

      Here’s how Tyler Hamilton, who rode with Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team for a number of years, described the competitive landscape at the 1997 Tour de France. Read it for us please, Ms. Maat.

    • Ms. Maat: “I’d be surprised if five [of the 210 cyclists who competed] were clean. That was what people did, and that was what you were expected to do. Back in 1997, I’d guess that 95–99% were doping.”

      Prof. Barry: Hamilton delivered this description on Choiceology, a podcast hosted by Professor Katy Milkman. The episode focused on what we’ve been discussing: the degree to which other people’s decisions affect your own and how hard it can be to resist following the crowd, even when you know that thinking more independently would be the right thing to do.

      Read a little bit more from Hamilton, please.

      Ms. Maat: “I felt like it was what I was expected to do. I [felt] if I said no to that testosterone pill, I’m not going to the Tour de France, and who knows what the rest of my professional career would’ve looked like?”

      Prof. Barry: Hamilton then offers the following confession.

      Ms. Maat: “I knew it was wrong. The whole time I knew it was wrong, but I told myself everybody’s doing it.”

      Prof. Barry: See how the threshold calculation switches? Initially, the question is “Who are going to be the first cyclists bold enough to take steroids?” But then, after the behavior spreads, the question eventually becomes?

      Ms. Maat: “Who are going to be the first cyclists bold enough not to take steroids?”

      Prof. Barry: Exactly.

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a grueling bike race

  • The Rider by Tim Krabbé, translated by Sam Garrett (1978)

    • Sample: “Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”

      

• For good sentences about the moral quandaries of professional cycling

  • We Begin Our Ascent by Joe Mungo Reed (2018)

    • Sample: “At first Liz’s friends called me ‘The Cyclist.’ ‘What kind of adult,’ she reported one of them saying, ‘worries about how fast he can ride his bike?’ Liz found this funny, and it was, though perhaps a little close to my own anxieties. She has always been an advocate of my career among her friends, however. She has learned to talk about the tactics, communicate the nuances of the sport. ‘You’re missing out,’ she tells friends who watch football or tennis or nothing at all. I am grateful for the advocacy, though also aware that, among her friends, it has caused me to be solely defined by my profession. I have read that when Minoans first encountered mounted horsemen, they came up with the myth of centaurs to explain what they had seen. To Liz’s friends, I think, I am at least half bicycle.”

      

• For good sentences about the history and cultural importance of bicycles

  • Two Wheels Good by Jody Rosen (2022)

    • Sample:

      • “The bicycle is a definitively nineteenth-century thing. It was the product of hard science and machine age engineering, of mass production and global trade. It was a creation of Victorian commercial culture, blown up big and spread wide by billboards and newspaper advertisements and popular songs.”

        

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about how to take potentially confusing data-rich information and put it in a context that is much more concrete and memorable. (The example involves a bicycle.)

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As the men’s soccer World Cup approaches, we thought we’d put together some materials about the planet’s most popular sport.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (2024)

2. Poetry: A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball by Christopher Merrill (2001)

Favorite Lines:

“he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge

   of his neck, heading it

from side to side, softer and softer,

   like a dying refrain”

—Picked by Eileen Barson, Class of 2026 (Home Team: Switzerland)

3. Essay: A 2026 World Cup That Doesn’t Rip Off Fans? Some Cities Are Showing That It’s Possible by Leander Schaerlaeckens (2026)

Photo Credit: Jared C. Tilton/FIFA/Getty Images

Favorite Sentences: “‘Being a host city for the World Cup is very different than being a host city for any other major event,’ Kane told the Inquirer. ‘And people recognize that it changes the profile of the city of Philadelphia.’”

—Picked by Fumi Takano, Class of 2026 (Home Team: Japan)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article in the Wall Street Journal that draws on the research of Professor Brian McCullough, the Director of the Center for Sports and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.

• Soccer Tackles Its Carbon Problem (2025)

  • Sample:

    • “In the UK—the birthplace of soccer—a quarter of stadiums are at risk of annual flooding by 2050, according to the country’s Meteorological Office. Meanwhile, extreme heat stress is already causing concern for player welfare around the world.”

    • “Many clubs are working to mitigate these risks by reducing stadium emissions, embracing sustainable technologies, and working to shape the behavior of fans, as the industry comes to terms with its own contributions to climate change.”

    • “Completed in 1996, the Johan Cruyff Arena is home to Netherlands soccer club Ajax. The stadium has since been retrofitted with more than 4,200 solar panels, as well as two superbatteries with a combined capacity of 8.6 megawatt-hours, the last of which was installed in 2023. And, as befits a Dutch organization, it also has exclusive access to a windmill—with a capacity of 2 megawatts. All this provides enough renewable energy to power not only match days, but potentially thousands of homes in the local community, according to Tanja Dik, chief executive of the Johan Cruyff Arena. The stadium aims for its operations to be net positive by 2030.”

Syllabus Sentences: When I want to teach students about what the sociologist Mark Granovetter describes as the “threshold model of collective behavior,” I often point to something that will likely happen a lot during World Cup matches this summer: fans doing “the wave.”

Photo Credit: Florian K, “Stadium Crowd Performing ‘the Wave’ at the Confederations Cup 2005 in Frankfurt” CC BY-SA 3.0

• Thresholds, An Act of Philanthropy, and The Wave (Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of The Syntax of Sports, Class 7: Information Flow)

  • Sample:

    • Prof. Barry: The idea of “thresholds” comes from a paper written by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter back in 1978. He explains the concept in terms of somebody’s willingness to join a riot. Here’s a key part of the paper. Please read it for us, Ms. Amos. Although Granovetter is a sociologist, I think that you, as a psychology major, will connect with what he has to say.

      Ms. Amos: “Different individuals require different levels of safety before entering a riot and also vary in the benefits they derive from rioting. The crucial concept for describing such variation among individuals is that of ‘threshold.’”

      Prof. Barry: Granovetter then offers a definition and some examples. We’ll start with the definition.

      Ms. Amos: “A person’s threshold for joining a riot is defined here as the proportion of the group he would have to see join before he would do so.”

      Prof. Barry: And now the first two examples: “radicals” and “instigators.”

    • Prof. Barry: Can anyone think of how thresholds might apply in sports?

      Ms. Bristol (jumping in): What about when football fans do “the wave”?

      Prof. Barry: The wave is a great example. We might use Granovetter’s term “instigators” to describe the fans who’ll start the wave without any prompting. But then there are also folks who won’t jump in until they see it really take shape.

      Ms. Bristol: Right.

      Prof. Barry: Which one are you, Ms. Bristol? Have you ever started a wave?

      Ms. Bristol: No. I’m someone who waits until the wave goes around the stadium a few times.

      Prof. Barry: How about rushing the field and tearing down the goalposts after a big win?

      Ms. Bristol: No. I’ve never done that.

      Prof. Barry: But can you see how it might be a threshold question?

      Ms. Bristol: Yeah. If enough of my friends rushed the field, I’d probably rush it too.

      Prof. Barry: And if the entire student section did?

      Ms. Bristol: Then I definitely would.

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences by a Uruguayan fan

  • Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried (1998)

    • Sample: “Like all Uruguayan children, I wanted to be a soccer player. And I played quite well. In fact I was terrific, but only at night when I was asleep. During the day I was the worst wooden leg ever to set foot on the little soccer fields of my country.”

      

• For good sentences by an English fan

  • The Game of Our Lives by David Goldblatt (2014)

    • Sample: “As football completed its mutation from an idiosyncratic aristocratic pastime to the most significant popular cultural practice of working-class life, it came to embody, in its sporting, cultural and commercial norms, the changing class balance and political compromises of the age.”

• For good sentences by a U.S. fan

  • Masters of Modern Soccer by Grant Wahl (2018)

    • Sample:

      • “The medical staff focuses on players’ recovery and keeps close tabs on their physical performance metrics in training and in games. (Martínez notes that the injury risk for players skyrockets whenever they exceed 3,000 to 3,500 minutes played in a season.)”

        

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip borrowed from the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his analysis of the possible ways to frame the outcome of a World Cup final: the words you choose can change the world people see.

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A number of my recent students have shared an impressive characteristic: each of them, in addition to being a law student, is also a dad.

A big thank you goes to all of them for helping pick the materials below.

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: Things My Son Needs to Know About the World by Fredrik Backman (2019)

Favorite Sentence: “They never argue about money, only about principles.”

—Picked by Steve Perry, Class of 2027 (Ages of my two kids: one is 2 years old, the other is 4 months old)

2. Poetry: Talking About the Day. by Jim Daniels (2017)

Favorite Lines:

“we did this,
we did that, sometimes leading somewhere, sometimes
not, but always ending up at the happy ending of now”

—Picked by Mike Shares, Class of 2026 (Ages of my two kids: one is 4 years old, the other is 1 year old)

3. Fiction: The Bear by Andrew Krivak (2020)

Favorite Sentences: “The girl lay back down on the pillow. Will I miss you one day? she asked. One day, the man said.”

—Picked by Tony Mayotte, Class of 2027 (Ages of my three kids: one is 6 years old, another is 3 years old, and the most recent is 2 weeks old!)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article that describes a study in which researchers from the University of Michigan School of Social Work examined the role that fathers play in how their kids develop, particularly during adolescence.

• Fathers’ Consistent Parenting Nurtures Bonds Through Teen Years (2025)

  • Sample:

    • “Fathers are often left out of research, but their perspectives matter,’ said Kaitlin Ward, U-M researcher in the School of Social Work and study co-author. ‘It can be challenging to study fathers because there’s often less data available about them.’”

    • “For example, in long-term studies, mothers are more likely to respond to surveys than fathers, so researchers often rely on mothers’ reports. [Our] study was unique, as it included responses from thousands of racially and economically diverse fathers across the U.S. This paves the way for more inclusive and nuanced investigations into fatherhood.”

    • “The study’s results are straightforward: simple, consistent involvement from fathers builds closeness during adolescence. ‘When fathers regularly talk to their kids, help with homework, and show interest in their lives, it strengthens their relationships over time,’ said Garrett Pace, the study’s lead author and assistant professor at UNLV. ‘These everyday interactions, especially in later childhood, are key to developing lasting closeness.’”

Syllabus Sentences: My students are often surprised to learn that Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named “Michael King Jr.” Here is a chapter that includes a description of the role King’s father—and the theologian Martin Luther—played in that name change.

• Michael King Day (Chapter 41 of The Syntax of Sports, Class 1: The Words Under the Words)

  • Sample:

    • Prof. Barry: There wouldn’t have been a Martin Luther King Jr. without the theologian Martin Luther—or at least not one by that specific name. Anybody know why?

      Mr. Marshall (jumping in): I do.

      Prof. Barry: Yeah?

      Mr. Marshall: Yeah. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t born “Martin Luther King Jr.”

      Prof. Barry: What was he born?

      Mr. Marshall: He was born Michael King Jr.

      Prof. Barry: Because?

      Mr. Marshall: He was named after his father, Michael King Sr., who was also a minister.

      Prof. Barry: But then?

      Mr. Marshall: But then, when Michael King Jr.—the eventual civil rights leader—was five years old, Michael King Sr. visited a bunch of holy sites in Germany.

      Prof. Barry: What happened during the trip?

      Mr. Marshall: His father became very inspired by the life of the theologian Martin Luther.

      Prof. Barry: And then what?

      Mr. Marshall: He decided to change his own name to Martin Luther.

      Prof. Barry: But he kept his last name.

      Mr. Marshall: Right.

      Prof. Barry: So his full name became?

      Mr. Marshall: Martin Luther King.

      Prof. Barry: Which meant his son’s name became?

      Mr. Marshall: Martin Luther King Jr.

      Prof. Barry: Which is why, every January, we celebrate not “Michael King Day” but “Martin Luther King Day.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about an American father

  • Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces by Michael Chabon (2018)

    • Sample: “Maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something to work against, to press upon, as you attempted to fashion a self from the lump of contradictory impulses and emotions and paradigms that your mind and your culture presented.”

      

• For good sentences about a Libyan father

  • The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar (2016)

    • Sample: “My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”

  

• For good sentences about a post-apocalyptic father

  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

    • Sample:

      • “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something that often distinguishes the best writers, as well as the best dads: being good with words.

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I have a number of law students enrolled in my courses this semester who have spent time working in restaurants. Given how helpful that kind of training in hospitality can be for the client-facing side of being an attorney, we thought we’d put together some restaurant-themed materials this month.

Enjoy. (And bon appétit!)

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: Your Table is Ready by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina (2022)

Favorite Sentences: “Do I love the industry? Yes. Do I hate it? Fuck yeah.”

—Picked by Nicola DePalma, Class of 2026 (Restaurant Experience: Held every position at NICO & VALI in Plymouth, Michigan, including serving as prep cook, working as the closing manager, and operating a food truck)

2. Poetry: Contemplations at the Virgin de la Caridad Cafetería, Inc. by Richard Blanco (1998)

Favorite Lines:

“assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia,
of tastes that swirl with the delicacy of memories
in these forty-cent cups of brown sugar histories,
in the swirling froth of café-con-leche, que será”

—Picked by Celina Boey, Class of 2026 (Restaurant Experience: Carside specialist who managed the “To-Go” orders at Applebee’s in Livonia, Michigan)

3. Fiction: Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li (2018)

Favorite Sentences: “He didn’t look like a man about to walk away ten grand richer. He looked like a man who’d just finished his potstickers.”

—Picked by Trinity Hoenig, Class of 2027 (Restaurant Experience: Server and trainer responsible for onboarding new staff at TAQ in Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Michigan Sentences: In 2012, the University of Michigan’s magazine for the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts published a profile of Rick Bayless, who, after graduating from Michigan with an M.A. in linguistics, eventually created Frontera Grill in Chicago, along with other award-winning restaurants.

• The Spirit of the Mexican Kitchen by Evan Hansen (2012)

  • Sample:

    • “‘I fell in with this group of students . . . we didn’t have any money at all, but we were all super into food,’ Bayless recalls. ‘I didn’t even understand how unique the food community of Ann Arbor was then, but it was centered around the farmers’ market.’ He and his friends would buy their fresh ingredients in Kerrytown and at Eastern Market in Detroit, meeting and interacting with farmers, a practice reminiscent of the everyday life he’d experienced in Mexico.”

    • “These linguistics students prepared food together regularly, exploring different cuisines from a myriad of cultures. Bayless started catering. He taught local cooking classes. Then he had an epiphany: ‘I was at least as interested in the relationship between culture and food as I was culture and language.’ That’s when the future James Beard National Chef of the Year stopped work on his dissertation and immersed himself in the food of Mexico.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is a short excerpt I give students when we are learning about something that can be important both to people who work in restaurants and to people who work in law offices: the role body language plays in communicating positive and negative emotions:

• Body>Face (Chapter 8 of Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting)

  • Sample:

    • “The conventional wisdom has been that the information transmitted by facial expressions is much more significant. ‘We assume that the face conveys whatever is in the person’s mind, that we can recognize their emotions,’ says Princeton’s Alexander Todorov, who was part of the research team that conducted the study. ‘But that’s not necessarily true.’ Particularly when emotions reach a high level of intensity—when people are excited or angry or in pain—the nuances of facial expressions begin to blur. It’s like ‘increasing the volume on stereo speakers to the point that [the message] becomes completely distorted.’”

    • “Todorov and his collaborators found that body cues—not facial expressions—tend to be better emotional indicators. ‘Before I read this paper, I would have thought that the body only provides contextual clues,’ said the psychologist Jamin Halberstadt, who was interviewed for a story announcing the study’s findings. ‘[But the research] is not saying that bodily context helps interpret an expression of emotion—it is saying that bodily context is the expression of emotion.’ ‘The face,’ he continued, ‘reveals a general intensity of feeling but doesn’t communicate what the person is feeling exactly. The body is where the valid information comes from during intense feelings.’”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences by someone who has managed restaurants, including one that was anointed “The World’s Best Restaurant” in 2017

  • Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara (2022)

    • Sample: “We need to slow down to speed up. Later, this would become one of our catchphrases. I would remind the team: ‘You’re busy, and there are a thousand things you need to do for your tables. But take ten seconds to double-check the order you’ve put into the computer, because entering the wrong dish has the potential to ruin your whole night—and that of your guests! Go too fast, and you’ll end up slowing the whole restaurant down.’”

  

• For good sentences by someone who has studied restaurants

  • Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman (2016)

    • Sample: “The Delmonico’s restaurants managed to profit from the excess of the times without being tarnished by it, perhaps because of a certain unerring good taste behind the spectacles or else because of the self-effacing if ambitious personality of Lorenzo. He satisfied the whims of the nouveaux riches without alienating what passed for old money in New York.”

  

• For good sentences by someone who has dined in a lot of restaurants

  • The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher (1943)

    • Sample:

      • “People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something that can be helpful to both writers and restauranteurs: enhancing your creativity.

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When a student recently learned that I teach a course called “Law and Letters,” which is designed to help people with the many types of correspondence they’ll engage in as lawyers (and humans), he asked me if there are any specific letters I’d recommend checking out. The one I shared, written by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman sixteen months after the death of his wife, can be found here.

A collection of other letter-related materials are below.

Enjoy.

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: Life and Letters by Roger Angell (2011)

Favorite Sentence: “Secrets—an expected baby, a lowdown joke, a killer piece of gossip—require a stamp and a sealed flap, and perhaps apologies do as well (‘I don’t know what came over me.’)”

—Picked by Logan Venclauskas, Class of 2027 (Last Letter I Sent: To my grandparents, as part of a Christmas card)

2. Poetry: The Lost Art of Letter Writing by Eavan Boland (2014)

Favorite Sentence:

“First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory.”

—Picked by Emily Ming, Class of 2026 (Last Letter I Sent: To my friend Hannah)

3. Fiction: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Favorite Sentence: “But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.”

—Picked by Tannicil Bellot, Class of 2026 (Last Letter I Sent: To my partner, every day for the first two weeks of February)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s a short summary of a book called Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters by Professor Dena Goodman, the Lila Miller Professor of History and Women’s Studies.

• Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009)

  • Sample:

    • “Over the course of the eighteenth century in France, increasing numbers of women, from the wives and daughters of artisans and merchants to countesses and queens, became writers—not authors, and not mere signers of names, but writers of letters.”

    • “These letters allow Goodman to explore how particular girls of different social positions came to womanhood through letter writing. She shows how letter writing expanded women's horizons even as it deepened their ability to reflect on themselves.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is a chapter I give students to help them with a type of letter that can play a big role in their professional trajectory: cover letters.

• Sentences Nobody Else Can Write (Chapter 8 of Feedback Loops: How to Give and Receive High-Quality Feedback)

  • Sample:

    • “Don’t make the mistake of treating résumés and cover letters as interchangeable. They have separate features and functions.

      A cover letter, for example, should not simply take the same information that can be found on a résumé and organize it into paragraphs. New, humanizing details are needed. So are background information, narrative flow, and an at once lively and professional tone. The best ones also include what I consider the gold standard when it comes to distinguishing yourself: sentences nobody else can write.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences by a literary letter writer:

  • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)

    • Sample: “Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable. They happen in a space that no word has ever entered.”

• For good sentences by a devilish letter writer:

  • The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942)

    • Sample: “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

    

• For good sentences by a bunch of different letter writers:

  • Letters of Note by Shaun Usher (2021)

    • Sample:

      • “North Brooklin, Maine,
        30 March 1973

        Dear Mr. Nadeau:

        As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.” (E.B. White)

        

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something you might try the next time you compose a high-stakes letter: to make sure you sound the way you want to, read what you wrote out loud.

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The 2026 Winter Olympics will soon start. So we thought we’d put together some materials that involve winter sports.

Enjoy.

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Poetry: Ice by Gail Mazur (2005)

Favorite Lines:

“Although there isn’t music, they glide
  arm in arm only the blurred surface together, 
  braced like dancers”

—Picked by Jack Kanzler, Class of 2026 (Favorite Sport in the Winter Olympics: Luge)

2. Nonfiction: Figure Skater Amber Glenn is Ready for Her Olympic Moment by D’Arcy Maine (2026)

Favorite Sentence: “So not to take away from what everyone else has done, but with Amber, she's pushing us all forward.” (from Amber Glenn’s choreographer)

—Picked by Samantha Leib, Class of 2027 (Favorite Sport in the Winter Olympics: Figure Skating)

3. Fiction: “Cross-Country Snow” by Ernest Hemingway (1924)

Favorite Sentences: “The gale scouring the exposed surface of the mountain had swept the snow surface into a wind-board crust.”

—Picked by Graham Hardig, Class of 2026 (Favorite Sport in the Winter Olympics: Freestyle Skiing)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s a collection of opinions from University of Michigan professors on a range of issues related to the Winter Olympics—from the long-term impact of the stadiums, to the strategic migration of athletes, to the social media opportunities for sports that might not get a lot of airtime from traditional broadcasters.

• 2026 Olympic Winter Games: U-M Experts (2026)

  • Sample:

    • PROFESSOR JUDITH GRANT LONG: “In the years since hosting the Winter Olympics in 2006, Italy has watched cities like Vancouver, Sochi, and Pyeongchang grapple with the lasting impact of Olympic venues and infrastructure. Vancouver’s focus on multiuse sites set new standards for community legacy. Sochi’s approach, by contrast, involved extensive new construction at enormous cost, leaving many venues struggling to find a purpose once the games ended. Pyeongchang tried to sidestep long-term underuse by relying heavily on temporary Olympic structures, but this strategy came with substantial expenses for both construction and removal.

      As Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo prepare for 2026, attention is on how venues—from the Mediolanum Forum in Milan to the sliding track in Cortina—can avoid the fate of underused or neglected facilities and genuinely serve the needs of their communities long after the Olympic torch is extinguished.”

    • PROFESSOR NARI SHIN: “As we approach this Winter Olympics, we’re observing an important trend: at least 20 athletes competing have naturalized to represent countries other than their country of birth,” she said. “This pattern of athlete naturalization has grown markedly in recent years, particularly in the context of the Olympic Games. Increasingly, nations that are historically not strong in winter sports are recruiting talented competitors to bolster their national teams.

      While this might appear to enhance global representation, it often leads to a concentration of elite athletes in a handful of countries. Many of these athletes originate from winter sport powerhouses and seek Olympic opportunities elsewhere when unable to qualify for their native teams. This development challenges the diversity of the Olympic field, as it shifts the athlete pool rather than broadening it, raising important questions about the evolving nature of international sport and competition.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is a chapter I give students to help them understand something that many Olympians have long realized: excellence is often achieved not through Herculean bursts but through the steady—even mundane—accumulation of progress. (The title is borrowed from a study the sociologist Dan Chambliss did of swimmers in the Summer Olympics. But his findings would definitely seem to apply to athletes in the Winter Olympics as well.)

• “The Mundanity of Excellence” (Chapter 31 of The Syntax of Sports: Class 4)

  • Sample:

    Mr. Wild: “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”

    Prof. Barry: She didn’t mean that success is common, that it is easy to achieve, that it requires no effort or drive. She meant that it comes from boringly consistent execution. Chambliss puts the point in somewhat more academic terms.

    Mr. Wild: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.”

    Prof. Barry: Read a little more.

    Mr. Wild: “There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any of those actions—­only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

    Prof. Barry: Here’s how Chambliss applies those findings to swimming.

    Mr. Wild: “When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on.”

    Prof. Barry: Each of those tasks, Chambliss says, seems small in itself. But each also enables the athlete to swim a bit faster every time they get in the pool, the cumulative effect of which is what, Mr. Wild?

    Mr. Wild: Excellence?

    Prof. Barry: Right. That’s “the mundanity of excellence.” It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen in front of a huge audience filled with people chanting your name. It happens mostly by yourself, through the unrelenting application of proven techniques for getting better.

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a fictional hockey town:

  • Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2016)

    • Sample: “She hates hockey but understands her father's love for it; the sport is just a different instrument from hers. Her mom sometimes whispers in her daughter’s ear: ‘Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.’ Her mom loves a man who loves a place that loves a game. This is a hockey town, and there are plenty of things you can say about those, but at least they're predictable. You know what to expect if you live here. Day after day after day.”

  

• For good sentences about a ski trip that goes bad:

  • One by One by Ruth Ware (2021)

    • Sample: “Outside the window the sky is iron gray, and the snowflakes swirl hypnotically past. It’s strange. Snow is so white on the ground, but when it’s falling, it looks gray against the sky. It might as well be ash.”

      

• For good sentences about ski jumpers:

  • The Ski Jumpers by Peter Geye (2022)

    • Sample: “Sheb crossed his arms. Even cloaked in his leather overcoat, his brawniness was plain to see. He wore size thirteen boots, the bulldog toes of which had been used on a dozen unlucky chumps.”

      

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something that I thought writers can borrow, not just from the Summer Olympics sports like tennis, but Winter Olympics sports like hockey (or even curling): the importance of “shot selection.”

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As we wish everyone a healthy 2026, we thought we’d put together some materials on a place that plays a big role in our collective immune system: hospitals.

Enjoy. (And Happy New Year!)

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink (2013)

Favorite Sentence: “There was little in his personal history or education that had prepared him for what he was seeing and doing now.”

—Picked by Muhammad Saleh, Class of 2027 (Hospital In Which I Was Born: Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, IL)

2. Fiction: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009)

Favorite Sentences: “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”

—Picked by Habib Saad, Class of 2026 (Hospital In Which I Was Born: William Beaumont University Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan)

3. Poetry: Nightingale Pledge by Romalyn Ante (2020)

Favorite Lines:

“I will devote my midnight listening to you hum a song— 
something that lessens the weight of my eyelids.”

—Picked by Emma Sand, Class of 2027 (Hospital In Which I Was Born: Mercy Hospital of Folsom in Sacramento, CA)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about a policy shift at a number of hospitals, including the University of Michigan Medical Center, that encourages doctors to apologize to patients when they make a mistake. The result: fewer malpractice lawsuits are filed, and claims are resolved more quickly.

• When Doctors Admit Their Mistakes by Pauline Chen (NYTimes, 2010)

  • Sample: “While the study documents the financial bottom line, Mr. Boothman [of the University of Michigan] notes that there have been perhaps even more significant repercussions in the culture of the institution. When the program first started, for example, a majority of injury reports came from patient lawyers. ‘Today more than 75 percent of the time we learn of an incident from the clinicians or from the patients themselves almost as soon as it happens,’ Mr. Boothman said.”

  • “That openness has in turn created an environment where patient safety and patient care, not avoidance of litigation, have become the priority. ‘All this program does is give permission to doctors and other caregivers to do what’s important and what they want to do: take care of the patients and make sure the same error doesn’t ever happen again in the future,’ Mr. Boothman said.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is a short reading I give students to help them understand the importance of spotting—and potentially switching between—different conversations styles, a skill that might also be helpful to any health professionals hoping to improve their bedside manner.

• “Conversation Styles” in Chapter 6 of Feedback Loops: How to Give and Receive High-Quality Feedback

  • Sample: “The linguist Deborah Tannen of Georgetown University is the author of several bestselling books. In one of them, You Just Don’t Understand, she identifies two types of conversation styles: ‘high-considerateness’ and ‘high-involvement.’”

  • “People who exhibit high-considerateness will generally let you finish your thought before they take their own turn to speak, she explains. They don’t complete your sentences. They don’t add side commentary. They don’t interrupt.”

  • “People who exhibit high-involvement, on the other hand, interrupt all the time. They’re not trying to be rude. They simply take a more active role when listening. They nod along. They interject words of affirmation (‘Right,’ ‘Yeah,’ ‘Exactly’). They enjoy when ideas and observations are coproduced.”

  • “Not knowing the difference between these styles—and what the person you are talking to prefers—can lead to conversational friction. To some people, high-considerateness comes across as indifference. To others, high-involvement signals disrespect. So learn to be adaptable. Whether in a one-on-one situation or in front of a big group, a good conversationalist is a flexible conversationalist.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a hospital in a small town:

  • The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander (2021)

    • Sample: “But once the new hospital committee set to work, they found that the world of medical care outside of Williams County was complicated and contentious. Innovations in medical science had birthed a new era not only in health but also in business and economics—and the nation was already roiled by what was becoming known as a crisis in medical care. That crisis wouldn’t stop. It rolled on and on, affecting every human being in the country and every town that built, or hoped to build, a hospital.”

    

• For good sentences about the role that chance plays in hospitals:

  • Random Acts of Medicine by Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham (2023)

    • Sample: “By the end of this book, you’ll have a framework for thinking about how chance might be affecting your life—at the doctor’s office, in the hospital, and beyond—and how we can use that knowledge to make ourselves healthier and happier, as individuals and as a community.”

      

• For good sentences about training to be a surgeon:

  • Complications by Atul Gawande (2001)

    • Sample: “We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about something that is important in both hospitals and writing: empathy.

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As the holiday season starts to ramp up, we thought we’d put together materials on an activity that will likely increase as well: shopping.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: The Science of Shopping by Malcolm Gladwell (1996)

Favorite Sentence: “On the basis of my address in Greenwich Village, Claritas classifies me as Urban Gold Coast, which means that I like Kellogg’s Special K, spend more than two hundred and fifty dollars on sports coats, watch ‘Seinfeld,’ and buy metal polish.”

—Picked by Amanda Swan, Class of 2026 (Local Shopping Center: The Shops at La Cantera in San Antonio, Texas)

2. Fiction: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

Favorite Sentence: “All her life Lily had seen money go out as quickly as it came in, and whatever theories she cultivated as to the prudence of setting aside a part of her gains, she had unhappily no saving vision of the risks of the opposite course.”

—Picked by Madeline Kaplan, Class of 2027 (Local Shopping Center: The Shops at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York)

3. Poetry: In the Basement of the Goodwill Store by Ted Kooser (1985)

Favorite Lines:

“you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms”

—Picked by Raisa Faatimah, Class of 2026 (Local Shopping Center: Louisiana Boardwalk Outlets in Bossier City, Louisiana)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article by Scott Rick, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, that explores the extent to which couples should be transparent about their spending habits.

• How Much Do You Need to Know About How Your Spouse Spends Money? Maybe Less Than You Think by Scott Rick

  • Sample: “In the United States, the median age of newlyweds has grown to 28 for women and 30 for men. This trend means that many Americans now enter marriage after being self-reliant for several years, including managing their own money. Will they be eager to change that once they get married? Don’t count on it. A 2017 Bank of America survey suggests that millennial married couples are around 15 percentage points more likely than their predecessors to keep their finances separate.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is an assignment that gives students a chance to challenge their standard modes of delivering feedback and perhaps learn something from retailers and other commercial enterprises.

• “Feedback Ruts” in Chapter 1 of Feedback Loops: How to Give and Receive High-Quality Feedback

  • Sample: “Sometimes we get stuck in feedback ruts. We offer the same generic comments from the same generic perspective using the same generic framework. That’s rarely helpful to the people who have asked for our feedback. Nor is it a good way to turbocharge our own personal and professional development. Rigid, one-dimensional thinking isn’t typically a great recipe for progress and growth.

    Assignment

    • Step 1: Make a list of at least five distinct forms of feedback you’ve encountered recently. Include more than simply ones you’ve been introduced to at school or work. Think also of the ways that movies get reviewed, restaurants get rated, and social media posts get ‘liked.’ We’re trying to deepen and diversify our feedback repertoire. So be creative, even playful, with your list. Irreverence and eclecticism may yield some valuable insights. Here are several ideas to show the range of possibilities:

      • The three-star system The Michelin Guide uses to rank top-class restaurants.

      • The five-star system you can use to rate everything from products on Amazon, to drivers on Uber, to places to stay on Airbnb.

      • The ‘Certified Fresh’ rating the website Rotten Tomatoes reserves for movies and television shows that receive high marks from both general audiences and professional critics.

      • The actual rotten tomatoes theatergoers have thrown at poorly performing actors.

      • The ‘thumbs-up/thumbs-down’ sign used by Roman emperors, modern-day YouTubers, and the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

      • The ‘Happy or Not’ buttons used in places as different as the post office, IKEA, and airport restrooms.

        

    • Step 2: For each form of feedback on your list, ask the following questions:

      • What does this form of feedback open up? In other words, what does it allow you to communicate that other forms of feedback do not?

      • What does this form of feedback close down? In other words, what does it prevent you from communicating that other forms of feedback do not?

You can ask these questions of pretty much any form of feedback. What does written feedback open up (and close down)? What does spoken feedback open up (and close down)? How about feedback delivered over the phone? In person? Via email? As a group? One-on-one? Anonymously? Informally? In a poll? Through a survey? Simply by a single emoji?

For now, though, stick to merely trying to generate your list of five distinct forms of feedback. Focus on variety. Focus on breadth. Focus on trying to break out of your feedback rut.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a protagonist who works at the department store Neiman Marcus:

  • Shopgirl by Steve Martin (2000)

    • Sample: “When you work in the glove department at Neiman’s, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.”

    

• For good sentences about how more choices when shopping (and living) isn’t always optimal:

  • The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz (2004)

    • Sample: “When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.”

      

• For good sentences about the paths products take before we get to buy them:

  • How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter Goodman (2024)

    • Sample: “More than fifty enormous vessels bobbed in the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean, marooned off the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As days stretched into weeks, they waited their turn to pull up to the docks and disgorge their cargo. Rubberneckers flocked to the water’s edge with binoculars, trying in vain to count the ships that stretched to the inky horizon. This was no act of war. Rather, this was what it looked like when the global economy came shuddering to a halt.”

      

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip about a writing move that can help when trying to vividly communicate all kinds of statistics, including ones about shopping: “un-numb the numbers.”

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To celebrate Halloween, we thought we’d put together a collection of materials that involve one of the holiday’s most fun—and frightening—traditions: haunted houses.

Trick or treat!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: A Brief History of the Haunted House by Chris Heller (2017)

Favorite Sentence: “What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and ‘dark rides’ (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects..”

—Picked by Mustafa Rasheed, Class of 2026 (Favorite Halloween Candy: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup)

2. Fiction: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)

Favorite Sentences: “But it is not Vienna. It is not Venice.”

—Picked by Joseph (“J”) Ehrenkranz, Class of 2026 (Favorite Halloween Candy: Watermelon Sour Patch Kids)

3. Poetry: Haunted Houses by Daniel Hoffman (1978)

Favorite Lines:

“No doubt that bulging china closet’s glass bow front
Had caught grotesque reflections from these stairs before—
But I was skinning down the rainspout when that thought
Found chink to clutch to in the riptide of my fear. ”

—Picked by Suji Kim, Class of 2026 (Favorite Halloween Candy: Very Berry Nerds Gummy Clusters)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article that suggests that every graduate of the University of Michigan “carries a cherished memory of campus—then returns in 20 years and realizes that [their] Michigan is hard to find among the new construction of someone else’s Michigan. Those old Michigans make up a ghostly terrain we might call the Lost Campus.”

Photo Credit: Campus Map in 1880 (Library of Congress)

• The Lost Campus by James Tobin

  • Sample: “In the 1920s, U-M zoologists got the idea of displaying living Michigan mammals to the public. So, in the summer of 1929, with money from an anonymous Detroit donor, they erected a fenced-in brick hexagon with a shingled roof, then brought in the first residents—a badger, a red fox, six raccoons, two porcupines, four skunks, and two black bears.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is a part of a chapter I give students when we are learning how to be more strategic about paragraphs. It includes an excerpt from Stephen King a writer who has written several books set in haunted houses, including The Shining.

• Chapter 8 of Editing and Advocacy

Sample: “I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing—the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. If the moment of quickening is to come, it comes at the level of the paragraph.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences that involve a haunted house in China:

  • Midnight in Peking by Paul French (2013)

    • Sample: “After dark the area became the preserve of thousands of bats, which lived in the eaves of the Fox Tower and flitted across the moonlight like giant shadows. The only other living presence was the wild dogs, whose howling kept the locals awake. On winter mornings the wind stung exposed hands and eyes, carrying dust from the nearby Gobi Desert. Few people ventured out early at this time of year, opting instead for the warmth of their beds.”

      

• For good sentences that involve a haunted house in England:

  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)

    • Sample: “The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.”

      

• For good sentences that involve seven haunted houses:

  • Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin (2015)

    • Sample: “She heard a rough, ghostly sound, her body trembling, and she recognized it as her own breathing.”

      

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip that includes an example from a 19th-century criminal law case that involved something that may be even scarier than a haunted house: a shipwreck that leads to an act of cannibalism.

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Breaking the attendance record for a ticketed concert held in the United States, over 112,000 people filled Michigan Stadium this past weekend to see country music star Zach Bryan perform. The event, which included John Mayer as the opening act, was also the first time a concert took place at Michigan Stadium (affectionately known as “the Big House).

So we thought it might be fun to put together some concert-themed materials this month.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: Storytellers: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

Favorite Sentence: “Here was a man, generously withholding his own grief of losing a dear friend and bandmate, spreading love and joy by sharing the most healing force in time of mourning: Music.”

—Picked by Jessica Korn, Class of 2026 (Most Recent Concert: Zach Bryan at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, 2025)

2. Fiction: An Equal Music by Vikram Seth (2000)

Favorite Sentences: “But it is not Vienna. It is not Venice.”

—Picked by Yuhuan Ye, Class of 2026 (Recent Concert: Lollapalooza in Chicago, 2025)

3. Poetry: Loud Music by Stephen Dobyns (1988)

Favorite Lines:

“Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language—
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.”

—Picked by Jordan Smith, Class of 2026 (Recent Concert: Pearl & the Oysters at the Chapel in San Francisco, 2025)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about a University of Michigan orchestra that consists of doctors, researchers, and other life sciences professionals who sometimes need to quickly transition from an operating room (or lab) to a concert hall.

Photo Credit: Kara Gavin, Michigan Medicine Department of Communication

• Life Sciences Orchestra Blends Science and Music for 25 Years by Kara Gavin

  • Sample: “On a recent Sunday night, musicians began tuning up for rehearsal in a hall at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance building on North Campus.

    One was in scrubs. A few were just days away from finding out where they had matched for residency after medical school. And one came straight from the lab, because the cells he’s growing for his doctoral work had not cooperated with the rehearsal schedule.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here’s a chapter I give students when we are learning about the benefits of seeking feedback from what the violinist Itzhak Perlman calls an “extra ear.”

• “Sound and Sense” (Chapter 4 of Good with Words: Writing and Editing)

Sample: “‘The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,’ Perlman told [the author and doctor Atul Gawande]. ‘Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.” Perlman therefore considers himself lucky to receive constant coaching from his wife, Toby, a concert-level violinist he met at music camp more than 50 years ago. Toby has been Perlman’s extra ear ever since. ‘She’d tell him if a passage was too fast or too tight or too mechanical,’ Gawande explains. ‘Her ear provides external judgment.’

A similar thing can be said of writing: what we hear as we are writing is not what the reader hears. There is often a gap between intention and effect, between what you plan to write and what you actually produce. Without someone to fill that gap, without an extra ear, our writing risks being confusing, awkward, dull, repetitive, incomplete—the worst kind of music.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a concert performed under duress:

  • Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (1979)

    • Sample: “Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”

• For good sentences about a fictional rock’n’roll band (and their concerts) in Dublin:

  • The Commitments by Roddy Doyle (1989)

    • Sample: “Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff alright. You’d never see Jimmy coming home from town without a new album or a 12-inch or at least a 7-inch single.”

• For good sentences by someone who is still performing concerts, even at the age of 76:

  • Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (2016)

    • Sample: “Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways.”

      

Quick Tip

Here is a quick tip on something that applies to both concert performers and writers: the importance of creating something your audience values.

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As school starts up again, we wanted to put together materials that honor a category of family members that, for many students, have played a big role in their educational development: grandparents.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Frederik Backman (2013)

Favorite Sentence: “But anyway, to get back to the point: life-saving and driving people nuts are Granny’s superpowers.”

—Picked by Jordan Barpal, Class of 2027 (Oldest Grandparent: “Satva Shosh,” who lived until the age of 99.)

2. Poetry: Sleepover by Kim Dower (2016)

Favorite Lines:

“the wrong horses at the corner OTB.

He’d only bet ponies”

—Picked by Liv Akkerman, Class of 2026 (Oldest Grandparent: Agnes Akkerman, who lived until the age of 89.)

3. Essay: Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son by Anne Lamott and Sam Lamott (2020)

Favorite Sentence: “Yesterday, I was walking around the house with Jax, who was sleeping in my arms, and we really were the ultimate portrait of what heaven will be like.”

—Picked by Elias Khoury, Class of 2026 (Oldest Living Grandparent: Elias Khoury, whom I am named after. He is 87.)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article by a pair of University of Michigan researchers that suggests grandchildren may have a role to play reducing social isolation.

• Grandparents Help Grandkids in Many Ways—But the Reverse May Be True Too, Poll Suggests

  • Sample: “The poll . . . suggests that having grandchildren and seeing them regularly may have a link to older adults’ mental health and risk of loneliness.

    Although the poll can’t show cause and effect, the findings suggest a need to study the role of grandparenting in older adults’ lives, as part of a broader effort to address social isolation.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here’s a chapter that describes a time I took my undergraduate class on a field trip to a retirement home. (Many of them said they called their grandparents immediately after the fieldtrip ended.)

• “Tom Wolfe, Justice Ginsburg, and Muscles as Accessories” (Chapter 11 of Syntax of Sports Vol 5: Rhetorical Repetition)

Sample:

“Prof. Barry: One year, I actually brought students to the retirement home where I teach the poetry class I mentioned.

Mr. Dewey (jumping in): Like a field trip?

Prof. Barry: Yeah, like a field trip. The idea was to compare the workout culture at the gyms on campus—where there are lots of mirrors, lots of tank tops, and lots of flirting and flexing—with the workout culture at the gym in the retirement home.

Mr. Dewey: I’m guessing you didn’t see a lot of tank tops at the gym at the retirement home.

Prof. Barry: Not exactly, no. Many of the residents dressed like they might for a day at the office. We saw people in khaki pants. We saw people wearing belts. There was even one guy with a sweater vest.

Mr. Dewey: Sounds intense.

Prof. Barry: It was. But you have to understand something. The habits and goals of someone who is working out when they are 80 are much different than the habits and goals of someone who is working out when they are 20. At 80, the point is not really to get buff or to trim down before Spring Break. The point, as one woman who had recently recovered from a stroke told us, is to stay alive.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a Finnish grandmother and her 6-year old granddaughter.

  • The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1979)

    • Sample: “‘What are you doing?’ asked little Sophia.

      ‘Nothing,’ her grandmother answered. ‘That is to say,’ she added angrily, ‘I’m looking for my false teeth.’

      The child came down from the veranda. ‘Where did you lose them?’ she asked.

      ‘Here,’ said her grandmother. ‘I was standing right there and they fell somewhere in the peonies.’ They looked together.

      ‘Let me,’ Sophia said. ‘You can hardly walk. Move over.’

      She dived beneath the flowering roof of the garden and crept among green stalks and stems. It was pretty and mysterious down on the soft black earth. And there were the teeth, white and pink, a whole mouthful of old teeth. ‘I’ve got them!’ the child cried, and stood up. ‘Put them in.’

      ‘But you can’t watch,’ Grandmother said. ‘That’s private.’”

  

• For good sentences about the stories a grandmother tells her 7-year old grandson.

  • The Witches by Roald Dahl (2017)

    • Sample: “I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But—here comes the big ‘but’—not impossible.”

  

• For good sentences full of lessons a grandfather wants to share with his 6-year old grandson

  • Grand by Charles Johnson (2020)

    • Sample: “I watch in wonder as he, a beautiful and brilliant boy who feels at home in a room of books and artistic tools, takes over my workspace for his projects. He raids my ream of paper on a bookshelf for his own drawings and books. He creates origami objects—houses, airplanes, pouches—because his imagination seems inexhaustible. An only child, as I was, he listens intensely to the ways adults talk, and tries out our grown-up language just to see how it rolls off his tongue.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about creating something that people of all ages can appreciate: writing that saves readers time.

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Given that the Wimbledon Championships in England recently ended and the U.S. Open in New York will soon begin, we figured we’d put together some tennis-themed materials this month.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Nonfiction: Open by Andre Agassi (2009)

Favorite Sentence: “Of all the games [people] play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower.”

—Picked by Ethan Haughie, Class of 2024 (Favorite Tennis Player: Andy Murray)

2. Fiction: Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2022)

Favorite Sentence: “In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else.”

—Picked by Juliet Alpert, Class of 2025 (Favorite Tennis Player: Sebastian Korda)

3. Poetry: Tennis Elbow by Jim Hall (1986)

Favorite Lines:

“until the thin pad

cushioning the heavy

parts of me from

the heavy parts of me

crumbles, disintegrates”

—Picked by Brandon Splitter, Class of 2024 (Favorite Tennis Player: Rafael Nadal)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an alumni interview with MaliVai Washington, who was a two-time All-American tennis player at Michigan before turning pro at the age of 20 and ultimately making it to the finals of Wimbledon in 1996.

• Alumni Update: MaliVai Washington

  • Sample: “My favorite collegiate memory was when we won the Big Ten Championship during my freshman year. I had a lot of success as an individual my first two years, but winning that team championship was by far my best memory of college tennis.”

Syllabus Sentences: I sometimes use a tennis analogy and the language of “shot selection” to teach students about the importance of strategically varying the length of their sentences. A link to the chapter that contains that analogy appears below.

• “Shot Selection” (Chapter 7 of Editing and Advocacy)

  • Sample:

    • “A tennis player who only excels back on the baseline or up at the net will not go as far as a tennis player who excels both back on the baseline and up at the net. Nor will someone who only has a good forehand go as far as someone who has both a good forehand and a good backhand.

      Part of why many people consider Roger Federer the greatest tennis player of all time is the completeness of his skill set. As the writer David Foster Wallace explained in 2006, the range of Federer’s game inspires a profound sense of awe:

      Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice—the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game—as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy.

      Imagine if your writing had Federer’s grace and versatility. Imagine if you could communicate in more than one mode, at more than one velocity, and through more than one syntactic configuration. Think of the range of thoughts you’d be able to articulate and how nimble and customized you could make your arguments. One-dimensional writing is not very persuasive. The best advocates have a much bigger repertoire of shots.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about tennis great Arthur Ashe

  • Levels of the Game by John McPhee (1979)

    • Sample: “Ashe’s principal problem in tennis has been consistency. He has brilliance to squander, but steadiness has not been characteristic of him. He shows this, woodenly hitting three volleys into the net in this first game, letting Graebner almost break him, then shooting his way out of trouble with two consecutive aces so hard that Graebner cannot touch them.”

      

• For good sentences about tennis great Maria Sharapova

  • Unstoppable by Maria Sharapova (2017)

    • Sample: “I’ve always loved to hit. From the time I was four years old. It’s the one thing that can fix any problem. You’ve lost Wimbledon in a frustrating match and everything that might have gone right went wrong? Pick up a racket and hit. The strings and the ball, the charge that carries through your body fixes everything. Hitting returns you to the present, where the flowers bloom and the birds sing. You’ve gotten terrible news from the other side of the world? Your grandmother died and there is nothing but a long flight and a funeral ahead? Pick up a racket, pick up a ball. And hit. The rules changed and you did not know the rules changed and all of a sudden a pill you have taken for years has undone everything? Pick up a racket and hit.”

      

• For good sentences about two tennis greats: Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal

  • Strokes of Genius by L. Jon Wertheim (2009)

    • Sample: “The peculiar dimensions of rivalry, the necessary distance and the necessary proximity, are laid bare in tennis. Positioned on opposite sides of the net, rivals spend hours engaged in wordless debate, swapping points and counterpoints and clever rejoinders, probing for weaknesses and setting traps. They’re out there alone, cordoned off from outside influence. Unlike boxing, there are no cornermen plying them with Vaseline, encouragement, and instruction during breaks in the action. Unlike golf, the competition is simultaneous. A tennis player can’t walk down the fairway while his rival takes his backswing; finally, tennis is the most gladiatorial sport going.”

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip based on an observation by David Foster Wallace, the writer (and former youth tennis star) mentioned above in the Syllabus Sentences section. A collection of essays Wallace wrote on tennis has been compiled into a book called String Theory.

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A good book + A good beach = A wonderful summer combination. So here are some beach-themed reading materials.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: The Wave by Susan Casey (2011)

Favorite Sentence: “The place had an almost northern feel, with fir and pine trees bent at arthritic angles from the wind.”

—Picked by Cedar Hobbs, Class of 2022 (Favorite Beach: Swami’s Beach in Encinitas, CA)

2. Fiction: Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (2009)

Favorite Sentence: “A car in the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down to the business of summer.”

—Picked by James Brown, Class of 2026 (Favorite Beach: Woolacombe Beach in North Devon, UK)

3. Poetry: Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop (1962)

Favorite Lines:

“His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.”

—Picked by Megan Hess, Class of 2026 (Favorite Beach: Cala Fuili Beach in Sardinia, Italy)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about a research team that is trying to help preserve the shorelines and beaches of the Great Lakes. The team is led by Professor Richard Norton of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

• Coastal Care: Researchers Work with Communities to Shore Up Effects of Erosion (2018)

  • Sample: “Several lake towns along the state’s western edge have faced even more costly damage to their beaches and structures because of fluctuating Great Lakes water levels. For example, in New Buffalo, severe shoreline erosion has cost private homeowners more than $7 million for repairs and resulted in one house demolition.”

Syllabus Sentences: One of the examples I use to describe how pervasive (and exhausting) feeling like an impostor can be—even among people at the top of their profession—is the beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won three straight Olympic gold medals from 2004-2012 along with her teammate, Misty May-Treanor. Here is an excerpt from the book I use.

• Chapter 37 of The Syntax of Sports: Drafting and Editing

  • Sample:

    • “At every kind of leveling up from eighth grade to high school, high school to college, college to the Olympic team—there was a moment, there were many moments of insecurity in the transition, many moments of, ‘Oh, shit. Can I do this? Am I good enough?’ It’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences set on the Dorset seashore in southern England

  • On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007)

    • Sample: “She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start—she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.”

• For good sentences set on the Isle of Skye in northwest Scotland

  • To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

    • Sample: “So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”

• For good sentences set on the beaches of Normandy in northern France

  • The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 by Cornelius Ryan (1959)

    • Sample: “The village was silent in the damp June morning. Its name was La Roche-Guyon and it had sat undisturbed for nearly twelve centuries in a great lazy loop of the Seine roughly midway between Paris and Normandy. For years it had been just a place that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. Its only distinction was its castle, the seat of the Dukes de La Rochefoucauld. It was this castle jutting out from the backdrop of hills behind the village that had brought an end to the peace of La Roche-Guyon.”

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about something that perhaps some time on a beach, free of distractions, might help you accomplish: learn how to compose “sentences nobody else can write.”

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As many recent law graduates start studying for the bar exam—and many current law students begin their summer jobs—we thought we’d put together some materials related to a drink that will likely be fueling their focus: coffee.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: The Science of a Perfect Cup of Coffee by Ernesto Illy and Andrea Illy (2015)

Favorite Sentence: “The oil binds the particles together into a condensed maze of minuscule air passages.”

—Picked by Connor Bulka, Class of 2025 (Favorite Coffee Shop: Curious Coffee in Ann Arbor)

2. Fiction: A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway (1933)

Favorite Sentence: “In the day time the street was dusty; but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.”

—Picked by John Angileri, Class of 2025 (Favorite Coffee Shop: Maplewood Coffee and Tea in Portland)

3. Poetry: The Morning Coffee by Ron Padgett (2013)

Favorite Lines:

“A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink
is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear’s por-
ridge, just right.”

—Picked by Sophia Guirguis, Class of 2025 (Favorite Coffee Shop: TeaHaus in Kerrytown)

Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about an effort at the University of Michigan to use chats over coffee with random faculty members to foster productive new ideas and research projects.

• Random Coffee Meet-ups Spur Innovation at U-M

  • Sample: “By creating opportunities for informal encounters with faculty outside their own fields, the program builds on the idea that such random pairings can not only create new connections, but also spark innovation and new research directions. The theory behind this practice is based on innovation as a social, not individual, phenomenon.

    The approach was born of an experiment initiated by business professor Bill Lovejoy, when he emailed fellow U-M faculty he didn’t know and invited them out for coffee. ‘Why would a business school professor talk to a classics professor, or an economist speak to an art historian? Because that is how innovation really happens,’ Lovejoy said. ‘If everyone at the University of Michigan had a random coffee once a month, within a year we’d have a more innovative organization.’”

Syllabus Sentences: Coffee is a common ingredient in the routines of many writers. Here is a part of a chapter I give students interested in some other compositional routines.

• “Habits and Habitats” (Chapter 2 of Editing and Advocacy)

  • Sample:

    • Constitutional Law Professor Cass Sunstein: “Most days I’ll mostly write from 9:30 until noon. There’ll be stops and starts, and I’ll typically go from one project to another, depending on how they’re going. At the moment I’m working on an article in the general area of behavioral economics and public policy. I’m also working on a magazine piece, on a very different issue. I like to go back and forth—if I’m stuck on one, I’ll jump to the other. I’m also working on my next book, which has nothing to do with my current one. I’ll turn to that if I feel something’s brewing there. Most mornings I’ll spend time on two or three different writing projects.”

    • Astrophysicist Sandra Faber: “It’s always been very, very important to me to have a balance between family and work. And I actually think that my work has been helped, especially in those early years, by having to tear myself away and do something different for some hours a day. I actually don’t have that as much now, and I think I’m overall not as efficient per unit of time; I get more done now because I have more hours, but I don’t think I’m as efficient as I was back then. So we had a daily routine. I do best when I divide my attention and spend some hours focusing on one thing and then switching attention and doing something different.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about coffee, civil war, and caffeine-filled resilience

  • The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers (2018)

    • Sample: “He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning.”

      

• For good sentences about the role that places like coffee shops—or what used to be known as “coffeehouses”—play in fostering innovation

  • Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (2010)

    • Sample: “The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilized countless Enlightenment-era innovations—everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself.”

  

• For good sentences by the founder of Starbucks

  • Onward by Howard Schultz (2007)

    • Sample: “Whenever I see someone carrying a cup of coffee from a Starbucks competitor, whether it’s an independent coffee shop or a fast-food chain, I take their decision not to come to Starbucks personally. I wonder what I, as Starbucks’ chairman and CEO, might have done to keep them away and what I might do to encourage them to come back or to try us for the first time.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about a cognitive trap that even the most powerful cup of coffee might not be able to fix: “attention residue.”

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Many of the international students who will walk across the graduation stage and get their LLM degrees in a couple weeks have had to do something extraordinary: navigate law school in a second (or third or fourth) language. To celebrate their multi-lingual achievement, we put together materials that focus on learning a foreign language.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: Mother Tongue by Amy Tan (1990)

Favorite Sentence: “I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech, and the nature of her thoughts.”

—Picked by Yin Hu, Class of 2025 (Native Language: Mandarin Chinese)

2. Fiction: The Intermediate Class by Sam Allingham (2018)

Favorite Sentence: “He would be riding the subway, or walking in the park, and the faces that appeared before him seemed less like strangers locked in silence than like people who might offer him their secrets, if given a small room, a whiteboard, a friendly teacher.”

—Picked by Max Wilden, Class of 2025 (Native Language: German)

3. Poetry: Translation for Mamá by Richard Blanco (2005)

Favorite Lines:

“In English

you’ve learned to adore your losses the way I do.”

—Picked by Debora Gunawan, Class of 2025 (Native Language: Indonesian)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article about the research interests of Lorenzo García-Amaya, a professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. The article includes a description of an animated video Professor García-Amaya helped create that explores the following question: “Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak?”

• Sample: “Historically, these speech components had been lumped into the broader bucket of ‘disfluencies’—linguistic fillers which distract from useful speech. However, none of this controversy has made these so-called disfluencies less common. They continue to occur roughly 2 to 3 times per minute in natural speech. And different versions of them can be found in almost every language, including sign language. So are ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ just a habit we can’t break? Or is there more to them than meets the ear?”

Syllabus Sentences: One of the rhetorical moves my students seem to really like learning about is “chiasmus,” which comes from an Ancient Greek word (chiazein) that means “crossing” or “in the shape of a cross.”

• “Chiasmus (‘A-B-B-A’)” (Chapter 3 of Notes on Nuance)

  • Sample: “Represented by the pattern A-B-B-A, chiasmus occurs when a certain grammatical structure is repeated—but in a reverse order. Here’s an example from the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, which chronicles a tribe of amazing long-distance runners who live near the Copper Canyon mountains in Northern Mexico.

    You don’t stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running.

    Notice the A-B-B-A pattern. You’ll see it again in the next example, from an ad campaign launched in 2017 by the motorcycle brand Harley-Davidson.

    All for freedom, freedom for all.

    Readers of the French novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas might see a resemblance between the Harley-Davidson phrase and the motto of Dumas’s trio of protagonists.

    All for one and one for all.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences by someone who won the Pulitzer Prize in one language (English) and then decided to write in a different language (Italian)

  • In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (2015)

    • Sample: “To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest. Without depending on solid ground.”

      

• For good sentences by someone who learned Icelandic in a week

  • Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing by Daniel Tammet (2017)

    • Sample: “Though English was the language of my parents, the language in which I was raised and schooled, I have never belonged to it.”

      

• For good sentences by someone who studies the relationship between language and the mind

  • The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker (1994)

    • Sample: “As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about an adjustment that writers in a wide range of languages need to make when they leave school: figuring out how to hold people’s interest when you don’t have the benefit of “subsidized attention.”

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The University of Michigan Law School is filled with not just some brilliant legal minds but also some brilliant amateur bakers. Here are some dessert-themed materials to celebrate their kitchen skills and generosity. (I am pretty sure that, in every semester I have taught here, there has been at least one day that somebody—usually unprompted—brought delicious baked goods to class.)

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Essay: Mountain Town Bakers Tackle the Art of Bread and Pastry at Elevation by Amanda Faison (2023)

Favorite Sentence: “The result: Lumi’s delivery boxes are replete with chewy ginger rye cookies, exquisite sticky buns, flaky kouign-amann complete with sugary air pockets, and an array of other treats.”

—Picked by Renuka Wagh, Class of 2025 (Favorite Dessert to Bake: Family Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies)

2. Fiction: Chocolat by Joanne Harris (1999)

Favorite Sentence: “Behind the papier-mâché, the icing, the plastic, she can still see the real witch, the real magic.”

—Picked by Sophie Hennings, Class of 2025 (Favorite Dessert to Bake: Strawberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting)

3. Poetry: Decorating a Cake While Listening to Tennis by Peg Duthie (2018)

Favorite Sentence:

“At hearing ‘luck’ again, I stop until my hands relax their clutch on the cone from which a dozen more peonies are to materialize.”

—Picked by Elle Sawyer, Class of 2026 (Favorite Dessert to Bake: Tres Leches)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article that examines the real—and perceived—risks of eating raw cookie dough. It was written by Brian Zikmund-Fisher, a professor of health behavior and health equity in the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

• “Is the FDA Being Grinch-Like in Raising Concerns about Raw Cookie Dough?” (The Conversation, 2018)

  • Sample: “Let’s all please remind ourselves that our goal is not to minimize all risk, no matter the cost. Our goal is to maximize life. Sometimes maximizing life means warning people that their flour is contaminated and making sure they throw it out. Sometimes maximizing life means letting them enjoy some (carefully prepared) cookie dough without shame.”

Syllabus Sentences: A feedback framework I have found useful in all sorts of situations—including when a student once asked for ways to improve a new brownie recipe she was experimenting with—is “Keep/Cut.”

• “Keep/Cut” (Chapter 2 of Feedback Loops)

  • Sample: “The questions at the heart of Keep/Cut are neither especially fancy nor especially innovative:

    • What should we keep?

    • What should we cut?

    [But they do provide] a dual benefit:

    • They lower the barrier to conversational entry for people who are more reserved. The simple menu of options—you can either pick ‘Keep’ or you can pick ‘Cut’—gives even the quietest people some participatory momentum.

    • They impose useful constraints on people who tend to ramble. There isn’t a whole lot of room for digressions or grandstanding when all you are being asked to do is say ‘Keep’ or ‘Cut’ and support your selection with a sentence or two of explanation. A comment that begins ‘Keep because _______________’ rarely leads to unproductive pontificating.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences—and poems—about, among other things, having bacon for dessert

  • The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink (2012)

    • Sample: “Food and poetry each insist that we put our own twists and ingredients in the mix: we make each dish, like a good poem, our own. With any luck, the result is both surprising and satisfying, exactly what we wanted, perhaps without even knowing it.”

      

• For good sentences by the owner of Chez Panisse, the small restaurant in Berkeley, California that, with dishes like its legendary almond tart, became famous around the world

  • Coming to My Senses by Alice Waters (2017)

    • Sample: “Our peach ice cream and coconut cake tradition evolved over the years into an obsession around finding the absolute best peach for my dad and making the ice cream from scratch in a hand-cranked machine, never really freezing it, just having it at that perfect texture where it’s off the dasher.”

      

• For good sentences by another famous chef and restaurant owner: Eric Ripert

  • 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert and Veronica Chambers (2016)

    • Sample: “I had my special restaurant suit, and spent weeks looking forward to the afternoon when I’d be presented with the chariot de dessert, the old-fashioned dessert cart, and allowed to choose as many pastries as I wanted.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about lessons that applies both to writing and to baking: the best, most authentic productions often take a few drafts.

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As students at Michigan (and many other universities) prepare to go on Spring Break, we thought we’d put together some materials related to a common vacation activity: hiking.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: To Build a Fire by Jack London (1902)

Favorite Sentence: “Empty as the man’s mind was of thoughts, he was most observant.”

—Picked by Selena LaBair, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore)

2. Poetry: Visiting Mountains by Ted Kooser (1985)

Favorite Lines:

“Here, lost in a mountain’s
attention, there’s nothing to say.”

—Picked by Ian Stevens, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: The Dune Climb in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore)

3. Essay: Saturday Morning Hike by Miranda Weiss (2016)

Favorite Sentence: “Kara and I agreed that being here was the highest use of this bluebird day.”

—Picked by Alex Haft, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: Mt. Megunticook in Camden, Maine)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an article about research that examines the potential benefits of taking nature walks in groups. The research was conducted by a team that included Sara Warber, an emeritus professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Family Medicine.

• “Group Nature Walks Linked to Improved Mental Health” by Beata Mostafavi (2016)

  • Sample: “Walking is an inexpensive, low risk, and accessible form of exercise, and it turns out that combined with nature and group settings, it may be a very powerful, under-utilized stress buster. Our findings suggest that something as simple as joining an outdoor walking group may not only improve someone’s daily positive emotions but may also contribute a non-pharmacological approach to serious conditions like depression.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here is an assignment I give students when they are trying to balance two questions that have many parallels to planning a good hike: (1) How much should I challenge myself? (2) How much recovery time should I build in?

• “Red Days and Blue Days” (Feedback Lab #5 of Feedback Loops)

  • Sample: “The point is to design a system that will allow you to better plan for and navigate the inevitable ebbs and flows of energy, opportunities, requests, disappointments, and surprises of a full life.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a monumental (and ultimately fatal) hike

  • Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)

    • Sample: “Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.”

      

• For good sentences about walking in general

  • Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit (2000)

    • Sample: “I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale.”

      

• For good sentences by someone who has a famous hiking trail named after him

  • My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir (1911)

    • Sample: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about a writing move that John Muir—the author who has a famous hiking trail named after him—uses several times My First Summer in the Sierra: putting the prefix “un-” in front of words where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it.

Sample:

• “The sunsets, when the trees stood hushed awaiting their good-night blessings. Divine, enduring, unwastable wealth.”

• “Everything rejoicing. Not a single cell or crystal unvisited or forgotten.”

• “The most resisting, unweathered portion of the surface is scored and striated in a rigidly parallel way, indicating that the region has been overswept by a glacier from the northeastward, grinding down the general mass of the mountains, scoring and polishing, producing a strange, raw, wiped appearance, and dropping whatever boulders it chanced to be carrying at the time it was melted at the close of the Glacial Period.”

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One of the cool things about the University of Michigan Law School is the number of faculty members who have PhDs in history. These include Emily Prifogle, Bill Novak, and Rebecca Scott. To honor the work they—and other professors—have done on American history in particular, we’ve put together the following materials.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

Favorite Sentence: “The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.”

—Picked by Alex Rizzutto, Class of 2025 (An event, before I was born, I would like to have witnessed: Jimi Hendrix’s Performance at Woodstock)

2. Non-Fiction: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand (2001)

Favorite Sentence: “It made him lose his belief in beliefs.”

—Picked by Peter Foster, Class of 2026 (An event, before I was born, I would like to have witnessed: The landing of Rochambeau’s French army at Rhode Island in 1780 during the American Revolutionary War)

3. Poetry: She Tells Her Children of the Assassination by Marjorie Saiser (1995)

Favorite Lines:

“In November of 1963, you
were all the center of my days
and when I heard on TV

Kennedy had been shot,
I wrapped you in your blue
blanket and walked for miles (I was

strong then), carrying you
on sidewalks in the middle
of a country stunned by rapid-fire

bulletins.”

—Picked by Zoë Bowers, Class of 2025 (An event, before I was born, I would like to have witnessed: The “Miracle on Ice” victory of the U.S. Olympic Hockey team in 1980)

Michigan Sentences: Here is an excerpt from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Professor Heather Ann Thompson. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017.

• Sample: “One might well wonder why it has taken forty-five years for a comprehen­sive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written. The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.”

Syllabus Sentences: When I am trying to teach students how to ditch jargon and instead communicate in concrete, compelling language, I turn to the book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America and tell them about the 19th-century preacher Charles Grandison Finney.

• “The Language of Common Life” (Chapter 6 of Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting)

  • Sample: “Frances FitzGerald won the 2017 National Book Critics Award for The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, a sprawling history of the remarkable influence evangelical Christians have had on American life. One of the figures she features is Charles Grandison Finney, whose religious leadership during the first half of the nineteenth century earned him the title ‘The Father of Modern Revivalism.’

    What helped make Finney so popular and effective was his commitment to speaking in what he called ‘the language of common life.’ ‘He looked at people in the audience straight in the eye,’ FitzGerald explains, ‘and addressed them as “you.” His sentences were short and cogent, and his expressions colloquial.’

    That’s a good strategy for conversational connection, especially when faced with a big group. Eye contact is important. Jargon can be off-putting. Long, meandering sentences can tax people’s patience, and obscure references usually do more harm than good. The ‘language of common life’ is a much better, more audience-friendly approach.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about 18th-century U.S. history

  • 1776 by David McCullough (2005)

    • Sample: “[T]he citizen-soldiers of Washington’s army were no longer to be fighting only for the defense of their country, or for their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen, as they had at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and through the long siege at Boston. It was now a proudly proclaimed, all-out war for an independent America, a new America, and thus a new day of freedom and equality.”

      

• For good sentences about 19th-century U.S. history

  • Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner (1988)

    • Sample: “Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education.”

    

• For good sentences about 20th-century U.S. history

  • The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (2006)

    • Sample: “Bam’s wife, Lizzie, hated the feel of No Man’s Land. The chill, hurried along by the wind, made it impossible to stay warm. The land was so threadbare. It was here that the Great Plains tilted, barely susceptible to most eyes, rising to nearly a mile above sea level at the western edge. The family considered dumping the organ, their prized possession. They could sell it in Boise City and make just enough to pick up another horse. They asked around: ten dollars was the going rate for an heirloom organ — not enough to buy a horse. Anyway, Bam White could not bring himself to give it up. Some of the best memories, through the hardest of years, came with music pumped from that box. They would push on to Texas, twenty miles away, moving a lot slower. After burying their dead horse, they headed south.”

      

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about something the best historians (and lawyers) do very well: use the “power of the particular.”

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To mark the end of 2024 and the start of 2025, we have put together a collection of materials related to something that many people use the beginning of the year to create: New Year’s resolutions.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

1. Fiction: Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple (2016)

Favorite Sentence: “The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and longshot of being alive at all.”

—Picked by Lindsay Barnett, Class of 2025 (Where I will be spending New Year’s: Ann Arbor, Michigan)

2. Non-Fiction: Good Habits, Bad Habits: A Conversation with Wendy Wood by Michaela Barnett (2019)

Favorite Sentence: “The best evidence we have at this point is that it can take two to three months to form a simple habit—to make something so automated that you don’t have to think about it, you just do it.”

—Picked by Andrew Baptist, Class of 2025 (Where I will be spending New Year’s: Troy, Ohio)

3. Poetry: Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)

Favorite Lines:

“Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.”

—Picked by Muhammad Qaasim, Class of 2026 (Where I will be spending New Year’s: Canton, Michigan)

Michigan Sentences: In 2017, University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning—if you have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, he is the “Dunning” part of that research team—was asked, along with some other experts, about what makes New Year’s resolutions so difficult. The sample below is his response to the questions “Why do so many people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions?” and “What can they do to increase their odds of success?”

• Ask the Experts: New Year’s Resolutions (2017)

  • Sample: “They make a resolution, but fail to come up with a plan for actually carrying out that resolution. If you commit to going to the gym, commit to a few specifics as well. What days or nights will you go to the gym? What do you want to develop—stamina, heart health, or strength? Is there a book or advisor who can suggest how to get to that goal? Remember, a goal without a plan is merely a wish.”

Syllabus Sentences: Here’s a “Self-Assessment” assignment I give students at the beginning of a course called “Good with Words: Writing and Editing.” It is designed to help them identify—and achieve—their current writing goals. Below are a couple habits the assignment suggests experimenting with.

• Self-Assessment

  • Habit: “Carry a notepad with me wherever I go and jot down ideas when they come to me.”

    • Benefit: “An electronic version of this goal can be fulfilled with the ‘Notes’ function on an iPhone or similar device. But I encourage using a physical pad because something magical often happens when you take the time to put pen to paper. Your mind slows. Your thoughts crystallize. You might just produce a second idea by the time you write down the first.”

  • Habit: “When I am about halfway through a writing project, call a friend, sibling, or parent and try to explain to them what I’ve already written and what I still have left to write.”

    • Benefit: “Writing often comes down to having a conversation on a page. Sometimes, though, that conversation first needs to happen with another person. So talk to people about what you are writing—and then thank them profusely.”

Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about personal change

  • How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman (2021)

    • Sample: “Research has proven time and again that rather than relying on willpower to resist temptation, we’re better off figuring out how to make good behaviors more gratifying in the short-term. Big payoffs far down the road just aren’t enough to keep us motivated.”

• For good sentences about social change

  • Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola (2021)

    • Sample: “The power of highly connected social stars (or, as we now call them, influencers) to spread innovations turns out to be one of the most enduring and misleading myths in social science. It has infiltrated the worlds of sales, marketing, publicity, and even politics. So much so, that even if an innovation spreads from the periphery to achieve worldwide influence, we still give the credit for its success to a social star.”

      

• For good sentences about completing major projects

  • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (2023)

    • Sample: “In total, only 8.5 percent of the [16,000 megaprojects we studied] hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 0.5 percent nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put that another way, 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both. And 99.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these. Doing what you said you would do should be routine, or at least common. But it almost never happens.”

Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip on a resolution that these monthly “Good Sentences” newsletters are designed to help you achieve: spend time reading quality pieces of writing.

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