Writing & Grammar: Parallelism

by Jennie Ruby 

 

Use parallel grammatical structures for parallel concepts. That is the grammatical rule called parallelism.

 

If you are going to use two verbs with one subject, for example, the two verbs have to be parallel in structure.

Not parallel: Ben had both to attend the ceremony and was going to the rehearsal.

Parallel: Ben had to both attend the ceremony and go to the rehearsal.

The examples I see in the grammar materials I teach from are often like the example above, where the verb is the only thing mismatched. However, in real life, or in the wild, things get a lot more messy.

A student I worked with last week was struggling with a bullet list with interlocking, nonparallel items. I have had other students send me similar lists asking for help in disentangling multiple problems at once.

Challenge

This week your challenge is to solve these gnarly parallelism problems. Two of these are examples I randomly found while reading magazine articles, and one is made up based on my student's text. Credit will be given to the best rewrite of each of these examples.

1. At XYZ company, we strive to help people
   • Engage with the materials in a new way that let's them
• Work asynchronously
• And also allows self-monitoring of course progress through our LMS
• While it also gives us reporting functions and
• Allows for full statistical analysis with visual graphing.
2. "You never saw them coming, and it's enough to knock you right off your chair and lose your concentration."
3. "I'm all for companies making the lives of employees more fulfilling, engaging and satisfying, but that means designing game systems that enhance work, and not simply try to exploit workers." 

As always, please send your answers directly to me.

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Answers to Last Week's Challenge

The answers to my last challenge are brought to you by Anne Goldenberger. Correct responses also came in from Joanne Chantelau Hofmeister, Michele Rose, and Ginny Supranowitz.

1. The doctor standing by the podium, Dr. Jasper Caspar, is a specialist in joint repair.
2. A very important concept, grouping, will be discussed in the next section.
3. ABC Senior Director Sing will speak at the all-hands meeting.
4. The one topic we should not ignore, reproducibility, is the very one we most often neglect.
5. The very important insect drosophila melanogasteris the topic of our next lesson.
6. This insect's main predator, the predaceous wasp,cannot alone control the population.

And for Chris [last name withheld to protect the innocent but you know who you are], I can imagine a scenario for number 2 where the comma after grouping could correctly be left off, so I'm giving credit for that. Here is the difference:

With both commas, the sentence says "A very important concept will be discussed in the next section." The word concept is the subject of the sentence and grouping is a grammatically nonessential interruption. But what if in the previous sentence something about grouping had been said, such as "Some of you may be wondering why we have not yet discussed grouping. A very important concept, grouping will be discussed in the next section." Here, the phrase "a very important concept" serves as an adjectival phrase modifying the word grouping, and the word grouping is the subject of the sentence. Hope that helps. But for number 5, the second comma is required.