The craft of writing well eludes many students—and adults—but newly minted KSC  alumnus Nathan Gray found the key to excellence when he approached writing as music. “I began to think of writing a page of prose as writing a page of sheet music,” said Nathan, also a musician and songwriter. “Each word can be a note, or each sentence can be a note. I kind of made it an art game, playing with the shorts and the longs. As in music, you choose a note and then you decide upon the most effective instrument to play that note. In the same way, you choose a concept and then you choose the best word or phrase to express that idea. As soon as I did that, my writing improved. Just as it’s not very interesting to have a bunch of quarter notes in a row, you don’t want a bunch of five-word sentences in your writing. You’ve got to come up with ways to add variety and present your ideas in interesting ways.”

And his approach has had dramatic effects: Nathan was recently awarded the Fred Fosher Excellence in Writing Award—and he graduated summa cum laude this spring—quite an accomplishment, considering that Nathan came to KSC from Keene High School with a 1.1 GPA his last quarter. And contributing to that dismal GPA was the fact that he failed his advanced writing course at KHS.

“I was never really a great student,” Nathan said. “When I got to high school, I was  uninspired. I got plenty of Cs and Ds, quite a few Bs, but As were a rarity.”

So what happened between KHS and KSC? The transformation was immediate. “My first semester, I had a 4.0,” he recalled. “I think a few things worked for me. First of all, my roommate was amazing—we’re still best friends. I know a lot of people who got bad roommates, and they dropped out or transferred, or suffered academically. Also, it stopped being about the test, it stopped being about memorization, and it started being about thinking. The teachers stopped being authoritative figures; they became your mentors and your friends.”

Another surprise: The only college-level English or writing course Nathan took was his Integrated Thinking and Writing (ITW) course his freshman year, taught by Elizabeth Pacilio. “She was just wonderful—she was a great friend and very smart, and she pushed in the right way, so that was a good thing right off the bat.”

With degrees in political science and economics, and a minor in women’s studies, Nathan is not pursuing a career in writing, but his path has given him the keys to excellent writing, and to inspired scholarship. “As a junior, I took a course in logical argumentation,” he recalled. “You don’t really write papers in that course, but you do learn about logical argumentation, and that really helped me with my writing.” As he strove to turn in good work, the writing he did in his other courses also helped him refine his craft. Obviously, he’s learned his lessons well.