Charlie used to have an editor who hated the word because. If because made its way into one of his gardening columns, she would call and ask him to change it. Luckily, after a short period she was promoted to a more important editorial position where she could presumably inflict her misinformation on an even larger group of writers. 

Because is a useful word, and a few minutes with a dictionary or Google could have cleared up that misguided editor’s mistake.

Where did her phobia come from? Very likely she’d had an English instructor who made the sensible observation that because ideas can be confusing. But that doesn’t mean you have to banish because from your writing. The remedy is to double-check the sentence for clarity.

I started thinking about the because problem this week when a confusing sentence popped up in an email I was writing. Oops! Here it is:

Charlie does as much of the palm pruning as he can even though a landscape crew comes every week because workers tend to butcher the trees.

Technically it’s a dangling modifier, sounding as if the crew comes every week because the trees are butchered. Wrong!

After some experimentation I came up with this solution:

Even though a landscape crew comes every week, Charlie does most of the palm pruning  himself. Workers tend to butcher the trees and can’t be trusted to do the job properly.

Here’s some writing advice you might find helpful: When a sentence is fighting all of your attempts to fix it, try rewriting it as two sentences. Often that trick works like magic.

And here’s some advice if you own palm trees: Never cut off a green or yellow leaf – and don’t allow landscape workers to cut off those leaves either. You can learn more here.