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.

"They" can be a problem

Here is a sentence that has an error, but not many people catch it: "Each student is responsible for cleaning their locker or they will be fined." Student is just one person whereas their/they means many people; in other words, student is singular and their/they is plural. When we speak, we commonly use they and their to refer to an individual if we mean the person could be either male or female. In English we don't have any gender-neutral pronoun other than "it" and we don't want to call any person an it. So we might say aloud "A child might miss their bus in the morning if the bus driver is early" because we don't want to assume that the child is male or female. The problem is that in written English, using they/their to refer to one person is--for now--inappropriate. It's a rule that drives me nuts, but alas we have to fix our they/theirs by doing gymnastics in our sentences to sound proper. Here are corrected sentences:
Each student is responsible for cleaning his or her locker (stays in the singular) or must pay a fine (rewritten to avoid they).
Students are responsible for cleaning their lockers or they will be fined (converts the sentence into plural).
A child might miss the bus in the morning if the bus driver is early (avoids their and uses the).
A child might miss his/her bus in the morning if the bus driver is early (ugly but acceptable in the singular).
Children might miss their bus in the morning if the bus driver is early (makes the subject plural).

"Because" can start a sentence...

Many people fear to start any sentence with "because" because they have been told by a well-meaning teacher to "never start a sentence with because." Well, forget that. The problem is not starting a sentence with the "b" word, but rather writing a fragment with it. The following is a fragment:
X Because I told you so.

That is not a sentence; it's a subordinate clause (rough definition: half a sentence). Here is a complete sentence that starts with because:
OK Because I told you so, you had better clean up your mess right now!

Here are two other examples, one incorrect and one correct:
X Because no one in their right mind would ever attempt to do something like that.
OK Because no one tried, no one knew if it was possible.
Notice that even though the first example is long, it is still a fragment. The second example, although shorter, is a complete sentence. Click spotting sentence fragments to find fragments in your work.

What does "vary your sentences" mean?

I will add to my blog later. I am hungry now. I have to make supper. I am writing boring sentences. I start each sentence the same. I have not varied my sentences. They are short. They have a subject and verb at the beginning. They sound robotic. It lulls you to sleep. You wish me to stop. I just keep going. If only I would write a nice subordinate clause like this one, then my blog entry would improve because readers like seeing and hearing variety in the text. To prove my point, I have not started the past two sentences with the same old subject and verb pattern. Variety, dear reader, is the spice in writing. Making your sentences interesting is an art form. But I digress. I wrote my blog post anyway. I am extra hungry now. I will go make supper. I will not write boring sentences. I will not write more boring sentences. I will ... munch munch munch ... not write with my mouth full.

Dressing a sentence in all its parts: Part 1

Ice cream (a subject and also a noun)
Ice cream melts. (a verb in the present tense)
Soft ice cream melts. (an adjective that describes ice cream)
The soft ice cream melts. (an article - one of three: a, an, the - that describes soft ice cream)
The soft ice cream melts in my hand. (a prepositional phrase starting with the preposition "in")
The soft ice cream melts quickly in my hand. (an adverb modifying melts, explaining "how")
When I sit outside, the soft ice cream melts quickly in my hand. (a subordinate clause)

Get that much down, with those fancy terms, and folk will consider you a grammatical genius.

Dressing a sentence in all its parts: Part 2

Here is another sentence with more terms to learn and impress the people you know:

He asked his girlfriend the question last night, and she said, "Yes!"

He (subject)
He asked (verb)
He asked his girlfriend (indirect object, the "who" of the verb's motive)
He asked his girlfriend the question (direct object, the "what" of the verb's motive)
He asked his girlfriend the question, and (coordinating conjunction that joins two independent sentences each having a subject & verb)
He asked his girlfriend the question, and she said (subject & verb)
He asked his girlfriend the question, and she said, "Yes!" (direct quote with quotation marks "" around it and a comma before it)

Now I have to look up the answer to whether this sentence ends with an ! or whether it gets a period outside the " because I actually think the nitty gritty grammar stuff is fun when it stumps me.

Dang dangling modifiers!

Been told you have a dangling modifier, but you have no idea what that means? Dangling modifiers are sneaky "ing" phrases that don't have a home, meaning the word they should describe or "modify" isn't present in the sentence. Here is an example: Going to the farmers' market, the sidewalk was blocked by construction. Who or what in this sentence is doing the "going"? The sidewalk? Nope. The people who are "going" do not show up in the sentence at all. I think we tend to write dangling modifiers for two reasons. We may just talk this way. If I said this sentence aloud, you would understand me because you would assume that "I" went to the farmers' market. But it is sloppy writing and can be corrected in many good ways: Going to the farmers' market, I found that construction blocked the sidewalk. Construction blocked the sidewalk on my way to the farmers' market. When I went to the farmers' market, the sidewalk was blocked by construction. Sidewalk construction blocked my way to the farmers' market. We also write dangling modifiers because we pause in the middle of writing to collect our thoughts and then restart mid-sentence without noticing the funny way the whole sentence comes out: Our little boy was wailing at the top of his lungs in the backseat driving down Highway 37. Here the writer paused to think about what to add and tacked a detail on the end, which seemed natural to the writer who had been doing the driving, but the whole effect sounds silly because either the backseat was driving or the little boy was. For how to punctuate well-written "ing" phrases, see my post on wacky "ing" phrases.

The "there are...that" crutch

Many new writers have a sentence pattern that they rely on far too often. It is a crutch that they don't really need. Here is the pattern with variations:
There are _________ that ________________.
There are _________ which _______________.
There are _________ who ________________.
It is _____________ that ________________.
Most often the three words such as There are/that can be eliminated and the sentence still makes sense. Suppose I wrote "There are people who never delete their old email messages." I could eliminate There are/who and I'm left with "People never delete their old email messages." This is close to the original meaning, but the original didn't mean all people. To really capture the original meaning, I could write "Some people never delete their old email messages." Here is another example: It is the Supreme Court that has the final say in major court cases. Instead, I could eliminate It is/that and end up with this: The Supreme Court has the final say in major court cases.

Parallelism is what, exactly?

If your sentence suffers from parallelism issues, it needs to have its pieces match. Think of a door with three hinges. What would happen if the top and middle hinges opened in the same way but the bottom hinge opened in the other direction? The door wouldn't function as a door at all! When you have non-parallel elements in a sentence, that sentence doesn't communicate well. It's confusing. The trick is to find what parts function as the hinges. Here is a sentence with a parallelism problem: After the maple tree clogged the downspout with seeds, rainwater had no where to go, sat for days in the gutter, and eventually the mosquitoes bred in the stagnant water. Fine, OK, we all get the picture, but the sentence seems to clunk along after we get to the word "and" because the third piece does not match the style of the first two pieces, like the bottom hinge of the poorly hung door. What are the hinges in this sentence? Rainwater had...sat...and ____. The first two hinges are verbs (actions of the rainwater) so what verb could we choose as a third hinge that would also go with rainwater and finish the sentence's last thought? Rainwater had...sat...and gave mosquitoes a perfect place to breed. Keep in mind, the hinges could be anything, not just verbs. They could be nouns, prepositions, wacky ing phrases and so on. I will provide more examples in a future post on parallelism gone wrong.

A basic sentence structure to fix fragments and run-ons

Who does what? What does what? If you want to write a complete sentence, you can ask yourself these two questions. They will help you create a basic sentence structure which you can build onto as needed. "Who/What" = the subject of the sentence, "does" = the verb or action of the sentence, and the final "what" = the predicate or the rest of the sentence. Here is an example: The dog ran into the neighbor's yard. Who does what? The dog (who)... ran (does)... into the neighbor's yard (what). This basic sentence structure can help you fix two problems in your writing, the sentence fragment and the ever popular run-on. If you have written a fragment, you will be missing one of the three parts: the who, the does, or the what. Read your sentence fragment aloud and ask yourself if it answers the question Who does what? That should help you fill in the missing pieces. If you have written a run-on, you will have strung a bunch of who does whats together and you need to find and separate them with punctuation. Look for your who/does pairs and highlight them. Somewhere in between these pairs will be where one thought ends and another begins. Take a guess on inserting a period and read aloud to check if it makes sense. A word of warning, there are weird subjects and verbs that don't seem obvious as a who/does or what/does pair. I talk about these in Part 1 and Part 2 of weird subjects and verbs.