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Have you ever read a sentence and it felt … off? Something just wasn’t right. But all the grammar was correct. It said what it needed to say. And after tearing your hair out, you still didn’t know what was going on with that sentence beyond the gut feeling that something wasn’t right.
If you have, chances are that you’ve been staring at what’s known as a parallelism issue. According to The Chicago Manual of Style, parallel constructions are “common in good writing.” And many a knotty sentence can be made beautiful by applying this.
What is Parallelism?
Parallel constructions in writing happen when sentence elements of the same type are linked in compound sentences. The elements that are linked can be words, phrases, or clauses. A key that makes the construction parallel, and therefore pleasing to the ear, is that the elements being linked are functional matches.
Functional matches means the parts of speech (or type of phrase or clause) are the same. We could have a list of nouns, a series of verbs, a combination of modifying phrases, and even a group of dependent clauses in parallel construction. These elements must also serve the same grammatical function in the sentence. The trouble comes when we start mixing these up. For example, having a list of nouns but including a verb in the mix, or grouping phrases but then tossing a dependent clause or single word into the mix.
Another key to parallel construction is syntactic linking (also known as coordination). This is what happens when the elements in the parallel construction are matching. The easiest way to check for this is to move the words around. If something renders nonsense, then the coordination is faulty and the syntax of the sentence breaks down.
Let’s explore these two areas in a bit more detail.
Functional Matches
Let’s start with an example that is lacking in functional matches.
She is an award-winning author, an athlete, and travels the country giving apologetics talks.
Here, there are three things describing our successful subject, but something is off about the sentence. If you take a close look at the three things, you’ll notice that they are different functionally. The first two elements are predicate adjectives (giving more information about the noun). The final element, however, is a phrase, and a verb phrase at that. The function of the third element is different from that of the first two. The result is a sentence that looks okay but is unpleasant to the ear.
The fix here is to make the third elements a functional match of the first two. This means rewording it to predicate adjective.
She is an award-winning author, an athlete, and a traveling apologist.
Syntactical Linking
As stated before, syntactic linking or coordination takes place when parallelism is present. The easiest way to spot that this is missing is to move the words or phrases around and see if they still make sense. Let’s return to our previous example to see this in action. What we will do is break it into three sentences, keep the opening words the same, and append each description of our lovely lady to see if the statements make sense.
She is an award-winning author, an athlete, and travels the country giving apologetics talks.
(1) She is an award-winning author.
(2) She is an athlete.
(3) She is travels the country giving apologetics talks.
As you can see, the first two statements make perfect sense. The third, however, is nonsense. This breakdown in the syntax of the sentence indicates the coordination is faulty and that the sentence needs attention.
Bringing It All Together
Remember, both syntactical linking and functional match need to be present for the construction to be parallel. If we had only checked the syntactical linking of the example sentence, then we might have reworded it like this:
She is an award-winning author, an athlete, and traveling the country giving apologetics talks.
Syntactically, the third phrase is now making sense after the opening words “she is.” (“She is traveling the country giving apologetics talks.”) But in terms of function, it is different to what came before. The previous two descriptors were predicate adjectives. The last phrase is now a participial phrase, which is a type of verb phrase. Even though the phrase is not creating nonsense when placed after the opening words, parallelism is not present because of the missing functional match. Both elements have to present for the construction to be parallel, and the construction needs to be parallel for it to be pleasing to the ear.
In Conclusion
Parallelism creates pleasing prose that sounds polished. It doesn’t get much attention because, as readers, we recognize its absence, not its presence. When you stumble across an awkward or “off” sentence in your writing, check to see if parallel construction is present. This means that the elements being linked will have both functional matches and syntactic linking. The easiest of these to check is the syntactic linking, so I recommend starting there before moving on to functional match.
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