Part 2 - SETTING OUR THOUGHTS IN PARALLELParallel construction is one of our most powerful tools for organizing and presenting ideas. Indeed, it cannot be overemphasized that making our sentences grammatically and semantically correct is simply not enough. We should also ensure that each of their grammatical structures that are alike in function follows the same pattern, for the observance of this basic stylistic rule very often spells the difference between good and bad writing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get a firmer grasp of how the three kinds of English verbals work
--the infinitives, gerunds, and participles--by checking out and
reviewing the following earlier postings in the Forum:
1. "How gerunds and infinitives work" 2. "How participles and participial phrases work"----------------------------------------------------------------------------To give us a much better idea of the power of parallel construction, let us first examine the following simple sentence: “Alberto likes
reading,
jogging, and
to play computer games.” It is structurally disjointed and it doesn’t read well because not all of its serial elements follow the same pattern. Although the first two elements, “reading” and “jogging,” are in parallel because both are
gerunds (“-ing” noun forms), the third, “to play computer games,” ruins the parallelism because it’s an infinitive (“to” + the verb stem).
One way to fix this structural problem is, of course, to put the third element also in gerund form, “playing computer games,” so that the sentence reads as follows: “Alberto likes
reading,
jogging, and
playing computer games.” It’s now grammatically balanced and no longer sounds stilted.
Another way for the original sentence to achieve parallelism is to make all three of its serial elements take the infinitive form: “Alberto likes
to read,
to jog, and
to play computer games.” This sentence, of course, can be streamlined even further by using “to” only once right before the first of the all-infinitive parallel elements: “Alberto likes
to read, jog, and play computer games.”
In actual practice, we have to put in parallel not only single words or short phrases but much more complicated grammatical structures such as
extended noun phrases and clauses as well as
long serial lists. However, the basic rule for parallel construction remains the same:
never mix grammatical forms. We have to choose the most appropriate form for the similar or related ideas, then stick to the same pattern all the way.
When a sentence has three or more extended grammar elements that are not of the same kind or structural pattern, establishing or discerning parallelism among them becomes even more difficult. Consider the following sentence:
“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because
he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,
often approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and
his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very bad.”
The first subordinate clause, “he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,” is in parallel with the second subordinate clause, “[he] often approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors,” because both are active verb forms using “he” (the advertising manager) as the subject. However, the third subordinate clause, “his human relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very poor,” disrupts the parallelism because it is in the passive verb form and takes for its subject not “he” but another noun form, “his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”
See how much better the sentence reads when the third element is modified so it becomes parallel with the first two:
“The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because
he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,
often allowed the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and
related very badly with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”
We will go deeper into the various ways of achieving parallelism in the next parts of this series.
--------------------
This reprises and updates the author’s 2006 series in his English Plain and Simple columns on parallelism as a mark of good writing. This essay, 2,133rd of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the January 12, 2023 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay in
The Manila Times:
Parallelism as a mark of good writing – 1(Next week:
Parallelism as a mark of good writing - 3) January 19, 2023
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
