During lunch with friends the other day, a retired English teacher sitting next to me bemoaned the disappearance of traditional classroom practices like diagramming sentences and labeling parts of speech.

I hope my grimace wasn’t too obvious. Folks: Those practices won’t help you become a better writer.

You need to learn usage (not grammar) – for example, how to use everyday words like I and me correctly (something many people don’t know how to do.)

And you need to know how to communicate your ideas to readers and listeners.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I subscribe to an online church newsletter that I really enjoy reading – often I learn something new about theology, church history, or another topic that intrigues me.

The latest newsletter featured this sentence. It’s perfectly grammatical, but it took me several readings to figure out what it meant. The topic was the features of a new sound system installed in the church.

Another change: unless the celebrant is not the preacher, no pulpit mic will be needed. CONFUSING

Too many negatives. I would have made this two sentences (the cure for almost any writing problem, by the way!).

Another change: no pulpit mic will be needed. The only exception is when the celebrant isn’t preaching the sermon.  BETTER

Or you could make both sentences positive. You might find the version below a little too folksy, but I like it:

Another change: no pulpit mic will be needed. The only exception is when someone else is preaching the sermon.  BETTER

The advocates of old-time-grammar frustrate me because they’re putting huge obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to write better. Common sense and a good ear will take you a long way!

More accurately, you can watch two writers think: My husband and me.

I always type the gardening columns he writes for our newspaper. Yesterday he dictated this sentence:

Eggfruit trees flower spring and summer and bear fruit in autumn and winter.

Yes, there really is a plant called eggfruit! But our concern is with the wording of that sentence. It’s grammatically correct – but readers are likely to be confused by the “spring and summer and bear fruit” wording.

I suggested this revision:

Eggfruit trees flower spring and summer, bearing fruit in autumn and winter.

That version is also grammatically correct, but it sounds awkward – at least it did when we reread it.

What to do? Think, writers, think!

And we did. We zeroed in on the original problem – that repeated and. If we could just get a comma in there – that would help.

Wait a minute! There’s a rule that you should use a comma when you join two sentences with and. Yes! Fist pump!

Here are our two sentences, elegantly joined with a comma + and:

Eggfruit trees flower spring and summer, and they bear fruit in autumn and winter.

Problem solved: An easy-to-read sentence that says exactly what he wanted to say. To learn more about this comma rule, click here and read about Comma Rule 2.

Most people would probably write “The quick brown fox….” I know that’s exactly what I wrote – or typed, rather – in my high school typing class.

The comma between quick and brown in the first panel is an elegant touch and a sign that the cartoonist really knows his punctuation rules.

Use that comma whenever you have two descriptive words (“adjectives”) together: hot, spicy soup.

And don’t confuse that comma with the hyphen needed in two-word phrases: long-term problem, first-class ticket.

To learn more, click here.

Back in the 60s, I went to a private women’s college (now coed) in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. My college is only a few blocks away from a prestigious art school, the Pratt Institute.

Pratt was featured in the New York Times yesterday not – as you might expect – for an artistic achievement. No, something unexpected has been going on there. At night. With a permanent black marker.

Someone has been slinking through Pratt’s Sculpture Garden under cover of darkness, correcting the grammatical errors on the explanatory placards.

Jay Dockendorf, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, became interested in the grammar project and began searching for the person (or persons) responsible – to no avail. He’s made a short movie about the placards and corrections and posted it on the New York Times website.

One question Dockendorf asked is how the errors crept into the placards. According to curator David Weinrib, the captions were written by his assistant, whose native language is French. He’s “not completely connected to the English language,” Weinrib says.

Gasp. Nobody thought to ask an educated native English speaker to review them?

Here’s a simple rule for anyone who writes for publication: Always, always ask a friend to read over what you’ve written. Don’t wait for someone to show up under cover of darkness with a black marker.

My husband just rushed into our home office with today’s newspaper in his hand. “Did you see this?” he demanded, pointing angrily at a picture on page 2 of the main section.

I leaned over to see what he was so excited about. A brood of cicadas is about to overrun areas on the East Coast of the US. Not an earth-shaking news story, in my opinion. I asked him to explain what had upset him so much about the cicadas.

“Not the cicadas, silly,” he said. “The caption!”

Oh. I understood right away. The article features a photo of a researcher holding a cicada and this impossibly complicated caption:

Gary Hevel, a research collaborator with the Dept. of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, holds up a preserved cicada, a brood of which are expected to emerge this spring in the Washington area, at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Camp Springs, Md. on Tuesday, April 23, 2013.

Fifty-two words, a host of facts (who Hevel is and where he works, what he’s doing, the significance of the cicada, where the picture was taken and when), all in one complicated sentence.

Instantly the voice of one of my graduate-school professors began to boom in my head: “One idea per sentence,” he would plead. “One idea.”

Yes. The caption that offended my husband (and me!) would be much better if it were broken into three shorter sentences:

Gary Hevel, a research collaborator with the Dept. of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, holds up a preserved cicada. A brood of cicadas is expected to emerge this spring in the Washington area. The picture was taken at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Camp Springs, Md. on Tuesday, April 23, 2013.

You should know, incidentally, that the original sentence is NOT a run-on. A grammarian would call it a…long sentence. A run-on is a pair of sentences run together that need to be separated with a period, like this one:

Gary Hevel is holding up a preserved cicada, this picture was taken in Camp Springs, Md.   RUNON

Here’s one way to correct the run-on:

Gary Hevel is holding up a preserved cicada. This picture was taken in Camp Springs, Md.  CORRECT

Carole King,  one of the most accomplished pop songwriters of our time, has just published a wonderful new autobiography called A Natural Woman. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book I enjoyed so much. King is very likable, she’s worked with some amazing people, and – my favorite feature of the book – she goes into some detail about how she creates her songs.

A Natural Woman is remarkable for another reason: The editing is meticulous. Comprise is used correctly every time. (It means “include,” not “composed of.”) All the pronouns are correct.

There was just one irritant that somehow escaped the editor: The constant use of respective, a meaningless word that’s distracting and almost always unnecessary. King refers to respective ideas, respective families…respective this and respective that. NO! Stop it!

Here’s just one annoying example. King went to a party with (I am dying of envy) Paul and Linda McCartney. Paul entertainingly reprised a recent appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, “playing the respective roles of David Letterman and Paul Shaffer.” Huh?

If you think a reader is going to be confused, use “own”:

We brought our respective ideas to the session.  NO

We brought our own ideas to the session.  YES

But it’s still a wonderful book.

I frequently write for a law enforcement website. Its managers send me links to news articles that might interest police officers, and I write them up to submit for posting.

Or I wish I did that. Usually I’m a few stories behind.

Part of the difficulty is that I’m a normal human being, not a machine.

And part of the difficulty is that I make the job harder than it probably needs to be. The easy way to write up the topics would be simply rewording the information in the article sent to me. But that’s no fun, at least to my way of thinking. I would rather find a way put the issue into a larger context – connecting it to a current trend or problem, or trying to show both sides of the story.

For example, I just wrote an article about prosecutors in California who are using the DNA from deceased inmates to clear some of their cold cases. I did a little digging and learned that the Supreme Court is considering a DNA-related Maryland case that has far-reaching implications. Justice Alito said it’s “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades.”

Explaining what that was all about and why it’s so important took some doing.

And of course procrastination soon reared its ugly head. The complexities were just too overwhelming to tackle. I kept thinking it would be better for me to wait for a large block of time to get the article done.

And while I was procrastinating, I kept reminding myself that the “large block of time” I was waiting for would probably never come. Like most people, I lurch through a typical day bouncing from one task to another. I rarely have the luxury of a long stretch of time to work on a difficult writing task.

Luckily I’ve gradually developed a system for managing these tasks that usually works well for me. Here it is – maybe it will work for you as well!

Step 1: Set up my document. These law enforcement articles always have the same format and the same headings (Summary, Title, To learn more, About Jean Reynolds).

Step 2: Collect the information. Read it and paste it into my document. (I usually paste in the entire text of every article I’ve read about the topic.)

Step 3:  Read everything again and decide what point I’m going to make in my article.

Step 4:  Highlight  sentences that have information I’m planning to use. I usually change the text color of those sentences to red or blue to make them stand out.

Step 5:  Copy-and-paste the sentences I’ve colored into roughly the order I want.

Step 6:  Delete anything I’m not planning to use.

Step 7:  Expand the sentences I’ve colored into the rough draft of an article.

Step 8:  Revise and edit.

Small steps get the job done – and it never feels like I’m working hard.

P.S. I submitted the article this morning!

I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s thinking processes – especially when their brains can do things that mine can’t.

Perhaps that’s where a lot of my fascination with dance and psychology comes from: How do dancers think about movement and music? What do psychologists think about as they encounter people doing both odd and ordinary things?

I’m hoping you’re equally interested in how writers think. Yesterday, while I was typing a column for my husband (he’s the garden writer for our newspaper), I found myself thinking about three of his sentences. We decided to leave two of them alone, and we changed the third one.

1.  What most folks think of as civilization began when humans learned how to grow food, an accomplishment that freed them from a nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle.

There’s a problem with the word accomplishment. What exactly was the accomplishment? Learning how to grow food. But the sentence never says that. There’s a rule in English that requires an appositive (accomplishment) to refer to a noun.

We violated that rule in that sentence (“when humans learned how to grow food” is an adverbial clause, not a noun). And we both decided that it was perfectly clear, few people would notice it, and we weren’t going to change it.

Full disclosure: If it had been one of my articles, we would have rewritten the whole sentence. I always visualize my readers as brilliant grammarians who are going to catch every picky mistake.

2.  On a much smaller scale, however, is a simple method home gardeners can use to save seeds of many herbs and annual plants, as well as vegetables such as cilantro and arugula.

My husband (he’s a good grammarian too) asked if we should insert “of” in front of vegetables. Technically the answer is yes, but I nixed the suggestion. He agreed (with some relief). I hate “of” and “that of” constructions and never use them. No, not even in my own stuff.

3.  Begin the process by cutting off mature seed heads and shaking them in small paper (not plastic) bags.

I am one of few people who make a distinction between “in” and “into.” I think it’s an important point, and in this sentence I think it’s downright vital. There’s a big difference between shaking the seed heads “in a bag” (put the seed head inside) and “into a bag” (hold the seed head above the bag so that you can catch the seeds).

I questioned my husband about which one he meant, and we changed the sentence so that readers will know that they’re supposed to shake the seed heads “into a bag.”

I hope you enjoyed visiting my brain!

Woman or women? Many people don’t know the difference.

You can try this on your friends – you’ll be astonished. Many people, it seems, have never written the word “woman” in their whole lives. Every female is a “women.” So here’s an experiment for you: Ask them to write a sentence that you dictate (not warning them that the tricky word is “woman.”) For example:

I’m expecting a phone call from a woman I talked to yesterday who works in the garden department.

Most people will write “from a women.”

I’m holding my head in pain today because I’ve already run into two woman-women errors, and it’s not even 1 pm yet. Here’s one from Facebook: (“the average American women”)

The other example is from today’s newspaper. A man named Paul Evans risked his life to pull a woman safely from a burning building (except that the newspaper says he rescued “a women”). Sigh.

Woman, women. Not difficult. Let’s be careful with these two words!

I’m always telling members of my writers’ groups to spend some time reading a novel by John Grisham. Any novel. Don’t think about his craftsmanship (which is considerable) – at least not right away. Just watch yourself reading, and notice how you feel.

You can’t stop.

That’s how you want your writers to feel. I always describe it as feeling like you’re riding a horse that’s decided to take charge of where you’re going and how you’ll get there.

A few months ago the writing group at the prison where I volunteer got together to get a gift for me – a copy of a Grisham book I’d mentioned wanting to read: Bleachers, the story of a successful high school football coach. As the book opens, Coach Rake is dying, and football players from years past have gathered to say good-bye and honor his memory.

It’s a tremendous book even if (like me) you don’t know a whole lot about football and might not understand some of the plays and strategies that move the story along.

And move it does, as Grisham’s books always do, and I tried to figure out why. It was tough to stop to step away from the story to analyze what Grisham was doing – he’s that good. But I managed to catch my breath long enough to notice that he holds back some important information in order to keep you interested.

In Bleachers, there are two unknowns that get you hooked right away. First, why was Coach Rake – legendary for his football successes – fired?

Second, what really happened during that championship game when the Rake and the assistant coaches simply disappeared, leaving the players to make all the calls themselves?

 I don’t know how Grisham does it – whether he’s so good that he just knows how to keep the story moving, or whether he consciously plans it that way. I know that Emma Donoghue, author of Room (one of the best novels I’ve ever read) plans her books that way.

In a 2011 Writer’s Digest interview, she discussed how she outlines her work:

…it’s more like planning a military campaign or something. It’s quite exciting, because what you’re trying to do is to keep up the reader’s energy at every point. You’re looking for those spots where things would sag or get lost or come off the rails. You’re trying to keep up the momentum.

A fascinating business, writing – always trying to figure out what the best writers do, and how they do it.