We hiked along the creek to Bear Hole, where we gratefully dropped our daypacks, shed our clothes, and plunged into the water. The following example joins parallel compound verb forms: This parallel structure is better than, for example, "High temperatures and the lowness of the humidity are typical of summers in Chico." High temperature and low humidity are typical of summers in Chico. This sentence uses parallel compound subjects: In any series, list, or outline parallel structure is required.Ĭoordinating conjunctions must connect like-patterned things.In any correlative composition using correlative pairs (not only.but also, either.or, neither.nor, both.and) parallel structure is required.(Note: It is not necessary to make the two parts of a compound sentence parallel, even if they are joined by coordinating conjunctions.) In any compound composition using coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet), such as sentences with compound subjects, compound verbs, compound adjectives, compound prepositional phrases, or compound clauses, parallel structure is required.Unless you are writing comedy, then, follow these rules: If we wanted to make this expression properly parallel, the two elements that follow "Skiing combines" should be grammatically equivalent: "Skiing combines outdoor fun with physical danger. "Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face." Compare the elegance of Confucius's parallel expression above to Dave Barry's unexpectedly non-parallel statement below: Parallelism is so important to the smooth flow of ideas that comedians sometimes deliberately violate the rules of parallelism in order to make us laugh. What he means, of course, is "We learn best by doing." But there would be nothing particularly memorable about saying so! For example, without their subject-verb pattern, these words by Confucius would not have nearly the impact they do: If there are two prepositional phrases, they are similar in form (with no verbs snuck in to transform one of them into a clause).Īchieving parallelism smoothes out writing and increases its impact. If there are two or more verbs, they are all of the same form. That is, if there are two or more subjects, they are all nouns or noun phrases. Parallelism is the way that we pattern writing so that similar elements in a sentence are grammatically equivalent. You vary word choice, for example, as well as sentence length and structure. Effective writing requires a certain amount of variety.
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