Parallel Grammatical Construction, Oh, My
Happy new year!
The title of this month’s offering sounds scary, but grammatical parallelism is a fun topic, I promise. Yes, I am a true grammar nerd.
Let’s get right into it: When you are talking about more than one thing, action, idea, and so on, the words of those things, items, actions, and ideas must be the same part of speech. Another way to say that is that they must agree or they must pair correctly. That is, if the first word in a series is a noun, the other words in the series should be nouns. The same is true if the first word is a verb, a prepositional phrase, or any other part of speech.
For example, the following list of activities is not grammatically parallel:
Incorrect: I like playing bells, writing books, editing text, and to walk in my neighborhood.
The words playing, writing, and editing are -ing words, or, in grammar-speak, gerunds. To walk is the infinitive verb form. To make the list parallel, you can change to walk to walking. However, you don’t have to choose the first series word as your guide. In the example above, I could have changed all the words to infinitive verbs:
Correct: I like to play bells, write books, edit text, and walk in my neighborhood.
Moreover, the “series” can be just two things:
Incorrect: He likes to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play and cheering them on.
Correct: He likes watching the Philadelphia Eagles play and cheering them on.
Correct: He likes to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play and [to] cheer them on. <You can choose whether you want to repeat the “to” or not.>
Here is another example and possible fixes:
Incorrect: Marley is a ghost, humorous, and out to teach Scrooge a lesson.
Correct: Marley is a humorous ghost out to teach Scrooge a lesson.
Correct: Marley is a ghost, a humorous spirit, and a teacher for Scrooge.
Correct: Marley is ghost-like, humorous, and instructive.
And one more set:
Incorrect: The woman was experienced, smart, and had a good understanding of the task ahead of her.
Correct: The woman was experienced and smart, and she had a good understanding of the task ahead of her.
Correct: The woman was experienced, smart, and able to understand the task ahead of her.
Correct: The woman had experience, intelligence, and a good understanding of the task ahead of her.
In my editing work, marketers use a lot of bulleted lists. Such lists are very helpful, but each bulleted item has to be grammatically parallel with the rest so as provide the clearest information to readers.
Sometimes, you can make sure you’re using the correct term by saying each item in the series as its own sentence, as if it were only one thing you were talking about. In the Marley example, you’d say these sentences:
Marley is a ghost. <This sounds fine.>
Marley is a humorous. <Whoops. We can’t have a humorous without a noun.>
Marley is a out to teach Scrooge a lesson. <Also whoops because a out to doesn’t work.>
And for the other example:
The woman was experienced. <good>
The woman was smart. <also good>
The woman was had a good understanding of the task ahead of her. <The words was had don’t work.>
Readers don’t always know what parallelism is, but they will understand you much better if you use it.
As you know, I just launched A New Heart. If you have read this book or any of the others in the series, I hope you liked them. If so, please provide a review or even just a star rating on Amazon or Goodreads. There’s some sort of algorithm that helps promote books the more reviews they have. Thanks for all your support!
As always, please comment and let me know your grammar pet peeves.