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When talking about writing, it’s useful to imagine sentences as being constructed or made up of building blocks. These blocks can be put together strongly or weakly, and that construction will influence how clear a sentence is.
Think about parallel construction in a sentence. While you may have heard the word "parallel" used a bit differently in a math course, here we use it to mean "matching." All the words and phrases inside the sentence need to be structured so that they are parallel; this is a strong way of building a sentence.
Thus, parallelism is the use of repeating grammatical structures to highlight similarities between ideas.
EXAMPLE
I like to sing, to dance, and to swim.Notice how in that list, each of the verbs is in its infinitive form, meaning each begins with the word "to." What if the form of one of those verbs changed?
EXAMPLE
I like singing, to dance, and to swim.Here, "singing" has been changed to the present tense, but "to dance" and "to swim" haven’t been. Though the meaning hasn’t necessarily changed fundamentally, the sentence is much harder to understand, and the construction is weak overall.
As you can see, a lack of parallelism is not just grammatically incorrect; it’s also confusing for the reader. Especially with lists of verbs, you need to be careful to match tense and number.
Now that you know what parallelism is, it's important to be able to identify and correct errors related to parallelism.
Take a look at this sentence describing Phil’s family and see if you can spot the parallelism error:
EXAMPLE
Everybody in Phil's family hates to read and playing cards.Now consider this sentence, which includes a list of adjectives instead of verbs:
EXAMPLE
The dungeon was cold, damp, and it was uncomfortable.What about the list of nouns in this sentence:
EXAMPLE
I wanted to travel in Spain, Italy, and in Portugal.Let's try one more:
EXAMPLE
I wanted to travel to Los Angeles and to San Francisco in California, as well as Memphis and Nashville in Tennessee.