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!