I taught parallelism (parallel construction in sentences) to college freshmen for many years. I don’t recall ever having a student who couldn’t figure out how to write parallel sentences.
So I continue to wonder why so many professional writers produce sentences that aren’t parallel. Here’s one I came across just this morning:
She was a talented graphic designer, a great writer, and was the president of a student club. INCORRECT
Perhaps the pros had English teachers who decided to skip the chapter on parallelism. Or writers today just don’t want to bother. Or they’ve forgotten how to do parallelism.
Let’s remedy that. One of the best ways to fix one of these offending sentences is to imagine it as a little poem:
She was
a talented graphic designer
a great writer, and
was the president of a student club.
You can easily see that item #3 doesn’t match #1 (a talented graphic designer) and #2 (a great writer).
That’s generally true, by the way. Ninety-nine percent of the time, item #3 is the problem in a non-parallel sentence.
So let’s fix it:
She was
a talented graphic designer
a great writer, and
the president of a student club.
Easy, isn’t it? Here’s our new sentence:
She was a talented graphic designer, a great writer, and the president of a student club. CORRECT
