Yeah, rewriting it like that is definitely one way to straighten out any confusion.
I like your idea of using PEMA because PEMDAS has an ambiguity that causes a lot of issues for people. For example:
6 – 2 * 0 + 3
You’d start with the multiplication:
6 – 0 + 3
But looking at the PEMDAS acronym, you might now be tempted to give the addition priority over the subtraction because it comes first in the acronym. This is not what you should do; addition and subtraction have equal priority, and when given both, you must move from left to right. The correct method would yield an answer of 9 while the incorrect method would get you 3.
The same is true of multiplication and division.