My blog provides tips for new writers on writing paragraphs, tackling grammar, and designing essays. There are also prompts for creative writers and ideas for tutoring and teaching writing. Enjoy!

Monday, July 8, 2013

Parallelism gone wrong...

Good parallelism means that in a series, each item begins with the same part of speech (verb with verbs, noun with nouns, preposition with prepositions, and so on):

Jackie runs to the store, buys food, and hurries home. (verbs: runs, buys, hurries)
Poetry takes years to learn, decades to practice, and a lifetime to master. (nouns: years, decades, lifetime)
To save him, the girls lifted the car off the curb, over his body, and onto the street. (prepositions: off, over, and onto)

Parallelism goes wrong when an item doesn't match its companions. What would happen if a door that hangs on three hinges had one hinge on backwards? The door wouldn't open. Similarly, faulty parallelism makes the sentence difficult to read:

X    Jackie runs to the store, buying food, and hurrying home.

No comments: