What can sports fans who start “the wave” at a big stadium teach us about getting people to speak up in class or at an important meeting? What can the poet Maya Angelou and the boxer Joe Louis teach us about streamlining sentences and paragraphs? And how exactly do we get our ideas to flow in powerfully persuasive ways? Explore these and other questions in the seventh volume of The Syntax of Sports, a series based on the innovative and highly interdisciplinary courses Professor Patrick Barry teaches at the University of Michigan.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
An All-American soccer player in college who holds both a Ph.D. in English and a J.D., Professor Patrick Barry joined the University of Michigan Law School after clerking for two federal judges and working in legal clinics devoted to combating human trafficking and reforming the foster care system. He is the author of several books on advocacy — including Good with Words and Notes on Nuance — and regularly puts on workshops for law firms, state governments, and non-profit organizations. He also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and has developed a series of online courses for the educational platform Coursera.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Class Roster
1. Previously On: Shitty First Drafts
2. Previously On: Extra Ear
3. Thresholds
4. An Act of Philanthropy
5. The Wave
6. Quiet
7. Social Loafing
8. Baseball, Bill Gates, and Clutch Players
9. Production Blockage
10. Evaluation Apprehension
11. Benjamin Franklin
12. Sentences, Ideas, Persuasion
13. For Want of a Nail
14. Bored and Confused
15. Tappers vs. Listeners
16. The Curse of Knowledge
17. The Sense of Style
18. The Disease of American Writing
19. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Joe Louis
20. Bloated and Wasteful
21. Adverbs
22. Adjectives
23. The Optimal Level of Advocacy
24. Doublets
25. English Never Stops
26. Control vs. Collect
27. Gawande
28. The End of Average
29. Brain Scans, Bobby Fischer, and Benjamin Bloom
30. Square Peg
31. Notes on Nuance: “Let Alone”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits