Parallelism, sometimes referred to as parallel construction or parallel structure, is vital in providing a smooth experience for readers. When all parts of a sentence or list have a similar grammatical structure, you have achieved parallelism.
Here are a few examples that are not parallel:
· I love watching movies, eating chocolate, and ice cream. Note that the first two items in the list begin with gerunds, but the third item is a straight-up noun. Everything in the list should be one or the other. Now, in this sentence, the reader can pretty easily discern what the writer means, but that won't always be the case.
· I love watching movies, eating chocolate, and Facebook. Does this mean that I love eating Facebook? No, but it could be taken that way. It should read I love watching movies, eating chocolate, and looking at Facebook or something like that.
· I love playing games and to watch sports. This should say I love to play games and watch sports or I love playing games and watching sports.
· I go shopping and then went to eat dinner. This is a pretty glaring parallelism error; the tense changed in the middle of the sentence. In cases like this, you don't really even need to know what parallelism is. As long as you're fluent in English, it'll be easy for you to tell that it just sounds wrong.
· The baseball player caught the ball easily and with grace. This is a subtler parallelism error, and honestly, I don't know if many people would even notice this. Technically, however, the sentence should be The baseball player caught the ball easily and gracefully or The baseball player caught the ball with ease and grace.
In most cases, you can tell if there is a parallelism issue by reading your work out loud. If it sounds off, you might have a problem.
I hope I'm explaining things clearly. Please share your any comments or questions you may have.
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