§ C) My mother, who is just shy of five feet tall, is normally incredibly soft-spoken, but on the rare occasion when she got angry, she was terrifying. I am not sure if she was more upset bymy hubris( 得意忘形 ) or by the fact that my English teacher had let my ego get so out of hand. In any , my mother and her red pen showed me how deeply flawed a flawless essay could be. At the time, I amsure she thought she was teaching me about mechanics, transitions( 过渡 ), structure, style. and voice. But what I learned, and what stuck with me through my time teaching writing at Harvard, was a deeper lesson about the nature of creative criticism.