Innovative Sentences to Learn From

a resource for student writing—now updated with even more sentences!

Take a side-profile look at any of my favorite books; you’ll find a litany of small gaps from dog-eared corners across their pages; open to any of those dog-eared pages; you’ll find a hastily-scrawled underlining of a sentence; the pen’s color having to do entirely with its proximity to me at the time of the dog-earring.

The result? I have a lot of really cool sentences from a lot of books that mean a great deal to me.

All of which led to one of my summer projects that I wanted to share today: a collection of fifty innovative sentence structures and techniques that can serve as writing models for students. (Summer 2025 update with 10 more sentences!)

From Maya Angelou to Cormac McCarthy to Yaa Gyasi to Chaim Potok to Toni Morrison—and with a whole section dedicated to the words of the late Brian Doyle—you’ll find sentences that run afoul from what we traditionally expect of sentences.

And they run afoul with conviction. And eloquence. And impact.

You can access the full project here. (And the accompanying spreadsheet here.)

Here’s a video explanation of what you’ll find in this project, too, along with how it has shown up in my classroom the past two years:

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More Than Just Model Sentences

the slide for the sentence I used to model the opening sentence of this post!

For each model sentence, I created a slide that contains not just the sentence with the highlighted writing technique, but also three other factors that are intended to make this helpful for others to use:

1. Technique Explanation—A very-brief description of what is being done in the example sentence to go beyond the “technique name” at the top of the slide. (Of course, this is just my own explanation, and I’m sure there are other ways to do this!) In these explanations, the emphasis is on the structure and how that structure itself adds to the meaning the sentence is trying to convey.

2. Teacher’s Note—An attempt by me to add a thought or suggestion about how this might work in the classroom for a teacher building from my own experience. The goal here is to make this a teacher-centered resource, so I tried to add these notes around either the skill that can be taught with the particular sentence model or a potential follow-up activity that could be productive with it.

3. Potential Application Prompt[s]—The best way for students (and everyone else) to learn is through application, so I included at least one way students could try out this sentence technique quickly and purposefully. Quite honestly, too, I tried to write these in a way that I myself could plug-and-play in my own classroom several months from now, hypothetically: quick activities for students to dive into in order to practice the sentence.

Overall, my hope is that the slide deck creates a ready-to-use set of tools that any ELA teacher can incorporate with a dedicated whole-class lesson while also offering a great resource to provide for students who are looking to push beyond the typical writing confines of an English class. (Particularly in a ChatGPT-infused world in which those typical writing confines become less valuable by the second.)

Update: two years later, here is a video explainer of the tool along with some reflections on how I’ve used it in my classroom:

[add video]

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the “Beautiful Language Wall” in our classroom

Why This Project?

Though I walked out of this past school year feeling great about what students achieved and the community they built, one reflection I sat with was an acknowledgment that I need to do better as an English teacher at giving students tangible models for writing at the sentence level. And I know that one way I will respond to this in the upcoming year will be by leaning on more scaffolds and tools for students around this skill along stronger formative feedback.

Nevertheless, I also want to keep a firm grasp on the value of innovation with writing going forward—and I believe this project can offer a foundation of tools to help push students towards more versatility and creativity in not just what they write but how. While I’ve long been a fan of celebrating instances of beautiful student writing, my goal is to go into this school year with a more intentional, systemic approach towards it.

And on a personal level, I wanted to lean on authors and books that have moved me as a reader. It would have been easy to start Googling different quotes from books I may have never even opened—but the best type of writing never arrives via easy.

Instead, I was able to sit with the joy that was opening books I have opened many times before; that was rereading sentences that had been underlined in enthusiastic-and-haphazard appreciation, sometimes years ago; that was thinking about what about these sentences made them so meaningful and worth sharing.

Not the worst way to spend one’s time, right?

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Update! 2 Years Later, How Has It Gone?

I wanted to circle back to this original post and provide an update of how it has looked in our classroom as a tool!

As you can see in the image above, it has become an excellent bellringer tool—particularly when we are working towards some sort of writing project. In one instance, we went through several of these and they became a fantastic tool for students to launch from in their end-of-year narrative projects!

Additionally, I’ve been able to pull select slides into a tool for students to explore and extend their learning while others are focused on revision or additional practice. This has helped with differentiation in an authentic way, especially in my upper-level classes.

If there’s a way that you’ve used it differently—don’t hesitate to share! Even after two years of using it successfully, I’m really curious about how it can grow and adapt further. Any ideas you have are welcome!