Four Words That Changed a|四个字改变一生 Not a big moment, perhaps. Yet small moments sometimes last a very long time. And a few words—though they mean little at the time to the people who say them—can have enormous6 power. “Are you too stupid to do anything right?” Words like that can I recently heard a story from a man named Malcolm Dalkoff. He’s 48; for the last 24 years he has been a professional writer, mostly in advertising. Here is what he told me: As a boy in Rock Island, , Dalkoff was terribly insecure9 and shy. He had few friends and no self-confidence. Then one day in October 1965, his high-school English teacher, Ruth Brauch, gave the class an assignment. The students had been reading To Kill a Now they were to write their own chapter that would follow the last chapter of the novel. Dalkoff wrote his chapter and turned it in. Today he can not recall anything special about the chapter he wrote, or what grade11 Mrs. Brauch gave him. What he does remember—what he will never forget—is the four words. Mrs. Brauch wrote in the margin12 of the paper: “This is good writing.” Four words. They changed his life. “Until I read those words, I had no idea of who I was or what I was going to be,” he said. “After reading her note, I went home and wrote a short story, something I had always dreamed of doing but never believed I could do.”
