The common core does require some nontraditional teaching methods in math—but using number sentences and having students show their work are not among them.

Though he doesn’t mention that experience in his new book, How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One, it’s not far offstage.

How do you write a sentence? Linking words together in the right way makes your writing easy to understand and interesting to read. When you are writing, words are grouped together into sentences.

Well, here you are, looking at this, trying, hoping, floundering, scrabbling, wishing, dying to find out the mystery of “how to” write a sentence. Or possibly you have tried write sentence and ...