But for all the external flair and flamboyance, Nick was in- tensely focused on his work and that of his students. He wrote comments almost as long as your own story, and sat you down for conversations that reminded you what a difficult but also what a noble calling writing was. His comments were penetrat- ing; he could see right through whatever cheap tricks you were trying to pull with your prose, and told you so. He exuded both sense and sensibility, reminding us that writers didn’t need to be slouches, physically and certainly not mentally. I began to check myself out in the mirror every time I left for school; and while I could never become half as dapper as Nick, I’ve tried my darnedest to imitate his command of the classroom with a smile and a long, complete, unbroken sentence. Harvard-trained Russell Fraser was a published Shakespeare scholar, and he kept us on our toes with provocative questions like, “What’s the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis?” While working for my PhD in Milwaukee, one of my proudest moments came when my professor Tom Bontly took a sentence of mine and held it up for the scrutiny of the class—not for any unusual loftiness of idea or wizardry of technique. “Look,” Tom said, “at how perfectly this sentence is punctuated.” Credit that to my teachers, who knew that whatever it was you had to say, mastery of the sentence and its elements was the key to saying it well.
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