When solving an equation, think of the equal sign as a wall. To keep your work organized, start by drawing a vertical line straight down through the equal sign. This simple trick creates a clear boundary between the left side and the right side of the equation, helping you see exactly where to perform inverse operations to isolate your variable.

Often, one side of your equation is cluttered with multiple terms of the same kind. Before you start moving things across your vertical line, you must clean up that side by combining like terms. For instance, in the equation $6a + 5a = -11$, the terms $6a$ and $5a$ both share the same variable. Instead of dealing with them separately, you add their coefficients together to get $11a = -11$. From there, a single division step reveals that $a = -1$.