The Detective Work
3. Step 1
Parallel structure often appears in lists or comparisons. These are your prime suspects! Look for words like "and," "or," "but," "bothand," "eitheror," "not onlybut also," "rather than," and "as well as." These words often signal that you should be checking for parallel structure.
For example: "She likes to sing and dancing." The "and" connects two items, but "sing" is an infinitive ("to sing") and "dancing" is a gerund. This is a red flag! This is a clear indicator to stop and evaluate if you want to fix that right away. It makes more sense when everything is parallel, it saves a lot of time.
Comparisons also use parallel structure. For instance: "Running is more fun than to walk." The comparison is between "running" (a gerund) and "to walk" (an infinitive). Again, mismatched! You might want to compare the same stuff together to have better impact on what you are writing.
The trick is to train your eye to spot these grammatical hotspots. Whenever you see a coordinating conjunction (like "and" or "but") or a comparison word (like "than" or "as"), your parallel structure alarm should start ringing. Consider all of these stuff when you write your article.
4. Step 2
Once you've spotted a potential parallel structure situation, the next step is to identify the pattern being used. What part of speech is being repeated? Is it a series of nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases, or clauses? Determining the pattern is like cracking the code — it tells you what to look for in the other elements of the list or comparison.
Let's go back to our earlier example: "She enjoys reading, to hike, and swimming." We've already identified that "reading" and "swimming" are gerunds. Therefore, we need to make "to hike" a gerund as well. The pattern is gerunds, so all elements should be gerunds.
Another example: "He is not only intelligent but also a hard worker." In this case, we have "not only" and "but also," which indicates a parallel structure situation. "Intelligent" is an adjective. What is "a hard worker"? It's a noun phrase acting as a complement. To maintain parallel structure, we need another adjective after "but also."
By carefully analyzing the grammatical structure of the first element in the list or comparison, you can establish the pattern and then check whether the other elements follow that pattern. This careful identification is crucial for making accurate corrections.
5. Step 3
Now for the fun part: fixing those pesky parallel structure errors! Once you've identified the pattern and spotted the mismatches, it's time to rewrite the sentence to create balance and harmony. This often involves changing the form of one or more elements to match the others.
Let's revisit our infamous sentence: "She enjoys reading, to hike, and swimming." We identified that "reading" and "swimming" are gerunds, so we need to change "to hike" to "hiking." The corrected sentence is: "She enjoys reading, hiking, and swimming." Ah, that's much better! The sentence now flows smoothly and sounds much more pleasing to the ear.
And what about: "He is not only intelligent but also a hard worker."? As we identified that intelligent is an adjective, a hard worker needs also to be an adjective. The corrected sentence can be: He is not only intelligent but also hardworking."
Remember, the goal is to create a sense of balance and rhythm in your writing. By ensuring that all elements in a list or comparison are in the same grammatical form, you can achieve that balance and make your writing more effective and engaging. Dont be afraid to rewrite your sentences to make things work. It is ok to change the original structure.
