Source: newyorker.com via Jean on Pinterest Look at the balloon for the guy in the middle: Perfect parallel construction. (Leave it to The New Yorker, right?) When a sentence is parallel, all the parts match, like a poem: My apartment is huge rent controlled and in a great school district Want to see a [...]
Source: Uploaded by user via Jean on Pinterest Sigh – so true! But the sentence isn’t parallel. (Even many professional writers don’t know how to do this!) In a list of three, make the items match: tasteless, boring, and annoying. Grammarians call this parallelism or parallel structure. I’d reword the sentence this way: “You’re [...]
Source: arcamax.com via Jean on Pinterest Do you know how to use parallel construction? Most people (even many professional writers) don’t know how to do it. Let’s take a look at this Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip. There’s a parallel construction problem in the first panel. When you make a list, you have [...]
I’ve found that even professional writers sometimes don’t know how to do parallelism. Here’s a problematic sentence from today’s local newspaper, The Ledger: Patten said Publix accepts coupons from manufacturers, competitors, and some online coupons. NOT PARALLEL The best way to learn parallelism is to make the sentence look like a little poem. (It’s also [...]
Parallel construction is easy to learn – and makes you sound like a professional writer.
Very few writers use parallelism correctly. Here’s an example from a Dear Abby letter published today. This sentence isn’t parallel and needs to be fixed: He is intelligent, financially stable, and loves me and my son. NOT PARALLEL Writing the sentence as if it were a poem can help you see where the problem lies: He [...]
