The boxes that volunteers had placed near the gym entrance before the charity event were moved to a dry storage room when heavy rain began. A reader who inserted a slash after nearly every word treated placed, were moved, and began as if they were three competing main verbs. A second reader first enclosed that volunteers had placed near the gym entrance before the charity event as a unit modifying boxes. The remaining main clause was simple: The boxes were moved. The final clause explained when the move happened. By restoring the main clause before attaching the modifiers, the second reader could explain the sentence without ignoring any detail. The useful skill was not avoiding all pauses. It was choosing boundaries that preserved grammatical relationships and then reconnecting each modifying unit to the word or event it described.