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Hello again. One rule that my students find unusually helpful is: One thought per sentence. It's hard enough for today's manic multi-taskers to grasp even one idea. Give them time to process thought #1. Then stop. Then give them the next fact that they need to know. That fact should develop or amplify sentence #1.

Be grateful for the period. The writer's natural impulse — such is the flood of information we are eager to impart — is to use a comma, followed by "and" or "but," followed by a phrase that slowly drifts down some bayou from which there is no easy escape. Be content to build a logical arrangement, one short sentence at a time; there's no sentence too short to be acceptable in the eyes of God.

I mention this because the national epidemic that's most on my mind right now isn't swine flu. It's the slow death of sequential thinking. My students, especially younger ones, go out on a story and come back with a million notes and a million quotes and absolutely no idea what the story is. Where is its narrative trajectory? The cause, I suspect — for which I don't expect a Nobel Prize in deductive reasoning — is that most people today receive their information from random images on a screen — windows, pop-ups, icons — and from haphazard messages dispatched by iPods, YouTube, Facebook, and wires stuck into their ears. Sequential thinking is a dying skill.

But the hard part of writing isn't the writing. It's the thinking. And that won't go away, no matter how many "new media" get invented. Tomorrow I'll be going up to Columbia University to attend the commencement exercises at the School of Journalism, where I tutor foreign students who need extra help writing English. I like to watch them walk across the platform to receive their hard-won diplomas, and then to meet their parents and grandparents and sisters and brothers from all the countries they have told me about and whose pictures they show me when I ask about their families back home.

The dean of the school, Nicholas Lemann, will tell the new graduates, as he does every May, that they are going forth into a journalistic career that will barely resemble the traditional newspaper model, where reporters wrote for one print medium that had one deadline every 24 hours. Today they will need to possess multiple skills, equally adept at writing for round-the-clock web sites and blogs and at making and editing videos and photographs and audio recordings to accompany their stories, which can be instantly transmitted to an editor from any part of the globe.

But they will still need to write all those web sites and blogs and video and audio scripts; nobody wants to consult a web site that's not clear and coherent. More than ever, they will need the ability to think sequentially. I remind my students that they're not practicing some exalted form such as "journalism," or "nonfiction," or "communications." They're in the storytelling business. We all are — all of us who do any kind of writing. It's the oldest narrative mechanism, from the caveman to the crib, endlessly riveting. Goldilocks thinks someone has been sleeping in her bed. What's that all about? Mister McGregor is in the garden with his gun looking for Peter Rabbit. Will Peter escape?

My students of all ages — memoir students at the New School, journalism students at Columbia — are in near-despair, paralyzed over their inability to impose a narrative shape on their past or on the events they are sent to write about. It comes as a surprise that they have to think. But as we work over their papers together to build a logical construction, one step at a time, they begin to glimpse the beautiful logic of the English language and their salvation in the simple word and sentence and the active verb that pushes the story forward.

For my foreign journalism students, the hardest lesson is that simple is good. Most of them come from cultures that have an entirely different notion of what constitutes good writing. "What kind of language is Arabic?" I asked a student from Cairo; I wanted to know how to reconfigure her thinking to my way of thinking: plain English. She said, "It's all adjectives." Of course, it's not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it's decorative and ornamental. Those are lovely qualities in a language, but they will be her ruin as a journalist trying to write storytelling English. She had to be given the bad news about sentences with no unnecessary words. Spanish-speaking students justly regard their language as a national treasure for its long and melodious nouns of generalized meaning. Nobody has told them that those long and melodious nouns will have to be cruelly shortened and converted into Anglo-Saxon verbs.

All of which has started me musing about what I might try to do next. America has been enriched by new tides of immigration, and many programs exist to teach "English as a second language." I suspect that those programs mainly focus on teaching the new Americans to speak English as a second language. But is anybody teaching them how to write English — clearly and simply enough to move into decent and upwardly liberating office jobs?

So ends my fifth and last journey into Blogville. Thanks for dropping by. Take care

I love short words and short sentences. I go to work every day grateful for the strong and simple verbs and nouns bequeathed to the wonderful English language by its Anglo-Saxon heritage, just as I hate the long and pompous words derived from Latin, its other principal source — words like "implemenation," which have no movement or life. I always choose short words over long words that mean the same thing. "Assistance" means "help." "Numerous" means "many." "Currently" means "now." An "individual" is a man or a woman or a child. Some of my sentences have so many one-syllable words that I could be arrested for sending them out into the world. When I read aloud to students a sentence that I love for its simple strength — perhaps by Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Thoreau — they think I'm kidding. They can't believe that simple is good. "If I write like that, people will think I'm stupid," they say. Stupid — I tell them — like E. B. White and the King James Bible.

But I also love to find a long or unusual word that's exactly right for the situation — one that I know will please the reader with its unexpectedness; surprise is the most refreshing commodity in nonfiction writing. Here are three sentences from my book Writing Places that gave me pleasure when they finally fell into place:

I was one of the first magazine writers to go to San Francisco in the winter of 1967 and bring back news of the 'love hippies' who had descended on the Haight-Ashbury district, decked out in 'ecstatic dress' and drugged out on LSD — flower children running away from their parents in the slumbering suburbs. I had no way of knowing that I had climbed aboard a wave that would move at tsunami speed. By June it had washed a huge tide of ragged postulants to San Francisco, where they camped out on the streets for a 'summer of love' that the city's safety and health authorities hope never to see the likes of again.

Beyond the small felicities — the alliterations and metaphors — that give the paragraph its sense of enjoyment, the idea that I was having a good time stitching it together — I really like "postulants." It's maybe my favorite word in the whole book. I don't think I've ever used it before, but it sprang from some recess of my mind when I was looking for a word to describe young men and women eager for admission to a religious order. I like to find precise words from a special discipline, like religion or medicine or music or carpentry, and use them in a general context.

Last March I wrote a piece for the New York Times on the Sunday before the opening of the baseball season, timed to the much-ballyhooed unveiling of the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets' new Citi Field. One paragraph said:

I assume that the new stadiums will feature the newest advances in audio-visual assault. I stopped going to Mets games at Shea Stadium when my friend Dick Smolens and I could no longer hear each other talk between innings — such was the din of amplified music and blather from the giant screen in center field. But baseball is also a game of silences. Every half-inning it invites its parishioners to meditate on what they have just seen and to recall other players they once saw performing similar feats. Memory is the glue that holds the game together.

Again, from the vocabulary of religion, "parishioners" is my favorite word in the article. It has the precise meaning of a like-minded group of people assembled in temple for a sacred ritual. One more dip into the liturgical soup: in Writing Places I recall several magazine editors who kept me busy with writing assignments. "Pamela Fiori, editor of Town & Country, which for a century had catechized its readers on the manners of the Eastern establishment, found me useful as her house WASP, a writer born into that milieu who knew its curious customs." Maybe that sentence will catechize a few writers in the benefits of surprise.

Medicine is also rich in special terminology waiting to be put to general use — all those words like "sclerotic" and "stenosis" that doctors so glibly throw at us. Fifty years later I still remember a sentence by S. J. Perelman that mentioned the peristaltic prose of the columnist Max Lerner. No amount of time spent rummaging in your brain for exactly the right word is misspent; your readers will smile at your effort to please them — always a good day's work. (Two English writers who keep me smiling over their choice of words are John Banville and the late John Mortimer. )

What I most fear is pomposity. I never write anything I wouldn't comfortably say in conversation, and I have a long mental list of those verbal mountebanks. "Quotidian." I just don't think of myself as going about my quotidian chores. "Scudding." Words that are only used in poetry should stay there; I've never heard anyone talk about clouds scudding across the sky. "The human condition." Isn't that what we used to call life — men and women and children contending with the Job-like trials of being alive? We're all stuck with the human condition. "Postmodern." I'll buy it as a scholarly term defining a specific period in art and architecture. But how about the postmodern sensibility that everyone except me seems to have? If "postmodern" follows "modern," doesn't it become the new modern? Or is there no more modern?

That's my existential dilemma of the day. Whatever that means

I don't enjoy descriptive writing — I was fed too much George Eliot and Thomas Hardy back in boarding school. A little heath and bracken can go a long way. I don't like to write what I don't like to read, so I reduce my writing to the bare minimum of facts that a reader needs to know. Readers curious to learn what my people look like, or what they are wearing, or what they are eating ("'I always wanted to be an actress,' she told me over a lunch of arugula vinaigrette with Portobello cheese and a glass of Chardonnay") will remain curious.

But when I started writing my new book, Writing Places, two years ago, I figured that a book grounded in the working habits of a lifelong journalist should make an effort — it wouldn't kill me — to recall how those places looked and sounded and felt. So I dutifully described the newsroom of the New York Herald Tribune, where I got my first job after coming home from World War II, in all its glorious squalor:

Decades of use by people not known for fastidious habits had given the room a patina of grime. The desks were shoved against each other and were scarred from cigarette burns and mottled with the stains of coffee spilled from a thousand cardboard cups.

I also described the exquisite seediness of Times Square, where, as the paper's movie critic, I spent hundreds of hours in smoky screening rooms and then walked back to the Trib building

past shooting galleries and X-rated movie arcades and novelty shops, past papaya juice stands and Nick's and Bickford's, past strip clubs and jazz clubs and cheap hotels, past Jack Dempsey's and the Latin Quarter and the Paramount, where legions of bobby-soxers lined up on the sidewalk for a chance to swoon over Frank Sinatra, and, finally, past the horror-crazed Rialto Theater, at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street, which beckoned me with ghoulish posters of monster movies and vampire movies, their titles dripping with blood.

Elsewhere in the book, I described the elevated billiard house in Westhampton Beach where I spent summers in the 1950s writing freelance articles for the Saturday Evening Post and Life; and the London flat where I wrote a profile of the newly famous Peter Sellers, balancing my Olivetti on a table obviously meant for teacups, my thoughts derailed every morning by a "daily" named Harty, who came to clean and stayed to talk in a Cockney accent too clotted to disentangle; and Yale's Gothic quadrangles, where I spent a decade teaching, their gates and moats and turrets and towers descended from the manor houses and country estates of England; and the crude shed in Connecticut where I wrote On Writing Well in the summer of 1974. I was proud of my Trollopian labors, and as my book grew in remembered detail, its manuscript pages steadily rising, I told myself that I was really writing.

But when the book came off the press, a few weeks ago, it was a very small book — small in size and weight and only 192 pages long. It wouldn't dent the stomach of anyone reading it in bed; I hadn't turned into Trollope after all. Description-wise, I was a failure. But the book was handsome and inviting, and I'm told that it reads very fast. It also says everything I want to say.

I can't think of a single fact in my life's journey as a writer that I now wish I had included. I'm reminded that the writer Elmore Leonard, asked why his books move at such speed, said, "I leave out the parts that people skip."

If the book reads fast, it's mostly because it's made of active verbs and short sentences. I'll get to that

Hello again, Powellites. Yesterday's blog was the first one I've ever attempted, written at the age of 86. I've never even seen a blog. The vast blogosphere is a universe as unexplored by me as the far side of the moon. My needs as a writer are simple, little changed over the years: a computer, a Webster's dictionary, a telephone that's plugged into a jack and stays on my desk. No cellphone. No e-mail; I don't need it for my work and I don't want to spend my life checking for messages. I get people to call me on the phone and actually talk to me. Those calls have brought me many friendships and much to think about. Readers who feel that they know me from my book On Writing Well often call with a question about writing, and I find myself drawn into lives I wouldn't otherwise know about. Last winter a woman named Fatima Al-Rasheed called from Kuwait with a writing problem that had her stymied. Could she come and see me? I told her it was her nickel, or dinar, and a few weeks later she was in my office, bearing a gift of dates packed in a sumptuous mahogany box.

My office is also a safe haven for present and former students. For many years I've taught an adult night course in memoir writing at the New School, and at the end I always say, "Once I have a student, I have that student forever." I also teach foreign students at the Columbia School of Journalism who need help writing clear and simple English, which is their second and often their third or fourth language. I'm the doctor they get sent to see. I'm not part of the school's formal structure of judging and grading; my only agenda is to be helpful, and I enjoy seeing my fledglings turn up at the door, enormously likable young men and women from every corner of the world — Bhutan, Uzbekhistan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Thailand, Colombia, China. Sitting at a table next to my window, hunched over their gallant efforts to subdue the English language, we occasionally come up for air and take spiritual nourishment from the synagogue across the street, or from the framed photograph on my wall of the 77-year-old E. B. White writing in his small boathouse in Maine, his only tools a crude writing table and bench, a manual typewriter, some paper, and a nail keg for throwing away all the sentences that didn't come out right the first time, or the fifth time, or the tenth.

Many younger writers have taken me as a mentor and have in turn become mentors to me. One of them, John S. Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine, was a student in the writing course I taught at Yale in the 1970s that would grow into my book On Writing Well. John has long been my unofficial editor. I send him the chapters of my books-in-progress and I call him when I need advice or encouragement. He knows what I'm trying to do, and knows when I'm not doing it. The child is father to the man.

(My office at Yale, incidentally, was one of the oddest of my writing spaces. My typewriter and I were directly beneath the 44-bell carillon in Harkness Tower, and if I had one bit of advice today for writers roaming the blogosphere it would be: Do not try to write under a 44-bell carillon.)

Another young mentor is Douglas Goetsch, a fine poet and an exceptional teacher of poetry in high schools and prison schools. We first met many years ago when he invited me to New York's great Stuyvesant High School to meet with his class, and he has since been a careful student of my work, tuned to currents of emotion that I wasn't aware of. Doug is my Buddhist guru. I also have a Jewish guru, Dr. Henry Seiden, a psychotherapist and poet, who studies my work just as carefully and, taking his cues from Dr. Freud, reaches the same conclusions.

Yesterday Doug called from the University of Central Oklahoma, where he has spent a year as a teaching poet, to read me a passage he found in a book of aphorisms by an Egyptian writer, Yahia Lababidi, called Signposts to Elsewhere, which says: "The magician who begins to believe his own magic ceases to enthrall." Doug said, "You've never believed your own magic. What you put into your books isn't anything like what your readers get out of it. For you it's just the farmer tilling his field every day."

I claim not have to have much of an interior life. I tell Henry Seiden, the psychotherapist, that I'm probably the only person in his experience who is working from external evidence. My interest is in people — the infinitely surprising things they do and say and think — and my pleasure is to make a narrative arrangement of what I find. Many of my books — about the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff (Mitchell & Ruff), about America's great iconic sites like Mount Rushmore (American Places), about the Florida baseball camp of the Pittsburgh Pirates (Spring Training) — turned out to have a high emotional content. That always came as a surprise to me. I thouht I was just fitting words together, telling people's stories — and my

Powell's Books has invited me to write five blogs in the next five days in connection with my new book, Writing Places, which is a memoir about all the places where I've done my writing and my teaching, many of them highly peculiar. Like the office in mid-Manhattan that had a firepole. I rented it from the legendary publisher Bernard Geis, who made pop icons of Jacqueline Susann and Helen Gurley Brown, with Valley of the Dolls and Sex and the Single Girl. Geis had the pole installed and went down it whenever he left the office, though he was then in his late 70s. The office being offered to me was ideal, but when Geis interviewed me as a possible tenant, I got the uneasy feeling that he wouldn't rent to me unless I went down the pole myself; it seemed to be some sort of test of renter suitability. "What you do is use your knees — that slows you down," Geis told me. I had never thought of myself as a man with strong knees, and I still don't. I landed with a thump that rattled my muscular-skeletal system and every organ it enclosed. "Wasn't that great?" Geis called down the hole. "Great!" I called back. "I'll be right up to sign the lease." I never went down the firepole again.

In 1991, Geis's lease expired and I moved to the nearby building where I've done my writing ever since, at 135 East 55th Street. I rent an office on the fourth floor from a marketing agency whose employees buzz around me at feverish speed performing arcane tasks to promote scents and other products of feminine allure. My window looks down on Lexington Avenue, with its rumble of buses and cars and taxis, and its frequent howl of sirens as police cars and ambulances and fire engines go about their errands of justice and mercy. I think pityingly of the folks at Powell's Books, stuck with nothing to look at except the scenic vistas of Oregon. I'm a fourth-generation New Yorker, my roots deep in the cement, my lungs long adjusted to its air.

The building on 55th Street is a massive Beaux Arts edifice, nine stories high, made of rusticated limestone and institutional red brick, with decorative balconies outside the windows. It looks like a power plant mated with an administration building at a state college, perhaps the economics department. It was built in 1902 as Babies Hospital — and built to last; it has a marble lobby. When the hospital moved uptown in the 1920s, its interior was carved into commercial offices, their handsome windows reaching to the floor. My window looks out at another of New York's architectural surprises — Central Synagogue, the oldest synagogue building in continuous use in New York, a Moorish-style creature of brown polychrome stone, its two octagonal towers and green-and-gold domes an unexpected whiff of the Levant. The synagogue is my anchoring landmark. It gladdens my Protestant heart.

Our building is a vertical family of small businesses and self-employed hustlers, all of us somehow meeting our deadlines and meeting the rent, year after year. The nameplates on the doors only vaguely suggest what the businesses actually do. There's only one small elevator, where we briefly enter each other's lives. Several small dogs get brought to work every day. I see their noses poking out of a ladies' handbag, their commute almost over. Food is also a frequent passenger — takeout sandwiches and yogurt and pizzas ordered by phone from nearby delis and rushed by small Mexican delivery men to the building's famished inmates.

I love the building's makeshift bravado. I walk there every morning from my apartment around 10:30, turn on my computer, and get down to the craft I've practiced all my life, not unlike the plumber or the TV repairman, going to work with his tools. My tools are words. It may seem odd to compare my work to plumbing, but both crafts are equally honorable. All crafts are. The fact that water can be made to flow out of a faucet on the 10th floor strikes me as an achievement no less miraculous than the construction of a clear declarative sentence. I like the daily discipline of fitting pipes together to make the water flow as smoothly as possible. I've never thought that I'm perpetrating "art."

Outside, in my village, all my survival needs are met just by walking downstairs. Our building is on a block of Lexington Avenue that only a born New Yorker could love — small stores jammed side by side, most of them with signs in the window offering bargains (ALL SHOES 80% OFF!) that would seem to preclude any possibility of a profit. Across the avenue, a two-story building of dubious structural integrity contains a 24-hour Korean grocery, an infinitely obliging copy shop, and a fitness center, where my trainer, Ed Irace, labors with machines and weights to unravel my writer's kinks. A few doors beyond it is a store that sells 5,000 magazines — my salvation if a former student calls to tell me about his or her piece in the new Mountain Bike or Spin. I'm one block from a bank, a post office, a FedEx, a Staples, and a Dunkin' Donuts. I haven't yet needed the eyebrow threading and waxing offered by Belleza's nail and beauty salon.

The building and its block are a perfect writer's habitat, as close to heaven as I'm likely to get, the best and I hope the last of all my writing