Parallelism as a mark of good writing

THE mark of good writers isn’t simply the richness of their ideas and their grammatical correctness but also their ability to set their thoughts in parallel.

to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and mean the mathematical sense of straight lines extending in gerunds, and participles. How the same direction, everywhere scrupulously this principle is equidistant and not meeting at applied in writing greatly deter mines the readability and perorderly positioning of identical suasiveness of the composition. syntactical elements in a sen tence. Indeed, the basic principle articles and prepositions. For for parallelism in writing is them we need to observe this that to ensure clarity and avoid parallelism rule: an article or a distraction, all grammatical elepreposition that applies to all ments of the ideas set in a series the serial elements of a sentence in a sentence should have the must either be used only once same form and structure.

This parallelism principle or else used again before every applies to all parts of speech, serial element. from articles and prepositions This is how awkward a sen- tence looks and sounds when this rule is violated: “The Chinese, Thais, the Indonesians, and Vietnamese all live in the Asian mainland.” Now feel the vast tonal improvement in the sentence when the article “the” element: “The Chinese, Thais, Indonesians, and Vietnamese all live in the Asian mainland.” Or when “the” is consistently used before each serial element: “The Chinese, the Thais, the Indonesians, and the Vietnamese all live in the Asian mainland.”

In practice, the most common indicator for the need for parallel structure is the presence of the conjunctions “and,” “or,” “yet,” and “but.” Take a look at this serial enumeration that requires “in” for each element: “We won in the major provinces, in the key cities, and in towns with a population of over 20,000.” The repeated use of the preposition “in” for all the three phrases in series dramatizes the idea of winning in each of the areas cited.

Now see what happens when we knock off “in” from the last two phrases: “We won in the major provinces, the key cities, and towns with a population of over 20,000.” The sentence remains grammatically correct, but it no longer has the rhythmic power and emphasis of the original understood in its proper context.

- ism to a higher plane by setting in parallel even more grammatical elements for that same sentence: “We won in the major provinces, we won in the key cities, and we won in towns with a population of over 20,000.” Using “we won” in all the three clauses gives the sentence emotional power—that burst of enthusiasm normally expected from the speaker under such circumstances. Such use of parallelism for rhetorical purposes is actually the secret of experienced orators and propagandists in making their arguments, valid or not, more memorable and persuasive.

The same value of parallelism can be seen in sentences using “or”: “You can take your vacation in New York, or you can take it in Paris.” This is much better and more emphatic than this nonparallel construction, “You can take your vacation in New York, or in Paris,” where the second “you can take it” has been dropped. And in sentences that use “yet,” like “You can take yet take the plane,” dropping the verb “take” in the second phrase weakens the sentence into this nonparallel statement: “You can take yet the plane.”

Setting thoughts in parallel)

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