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.

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.