Activity: Parallel Sentences

Parallel Sentence Construction

One type of consistency is parallel sentence construction (I'll refer to it as "parallelism" for short). Parallelism in a sentence means that words or phrases that are in a pair or series should be structured in the same way in order to make the sentence balanced. 

Non-parallel sentences, particularly when read aloud, will sound like something is out of place or awkward. When looking for parallel sentence construction, if you grew up watching Sesame Street, you might think of the little song, "One of these things is not like the others… one of these things does not belong". This is exactly what you are doing when you are looking for parallelism – finding the item in the list or series that looks or sounds different. 

The following sentence (in bold) is a series of three resolutions. To have parallel sentence construction, each of those three parts should be put together in the same way.

Let's examine each item in this list of resolutions:

"to lose weight"

"to study more"

"watching less TV"

Notice that the first two items are verbs with the word "to" in front of them while the last item is a verb ending in "ing". When we read this aloud, it doesn't sound very good.

We can easily fix this problem by simply taking the item that is not parallel and changing it so it matches:

When we read this aloud, we find it sounds much better.

Here's is another example for us to look at that is a little more difficult. It is a series of descriptions.

Let's take a look at how this sentence is put together – we'll look at each item individually:

The weather was hot – here we see the structure: noun, verb of being, descriptor

there were crowds in the city – here we see the structure: pronoun, verb of being, noun, prepositional phrase – reading aloud, you may have already noticed that this item sounds different from the others…

the buses were on strike – here we see the same structure we saw in the first item: noun, verb of being, descriptor

What we want to do now is make that middle item about the crowds sound like the other two.

Since each of these items is a description, you might ask yourself, "what is being described?" in the second item in the series that is not parallel with the other two. 

The answer to that question is, "the city," so now we need to figure out how "the city" is being described.  The answer to that question is, "crowded".

In the end, the way to correct this parallelism problem is:

Source: Erin Severs
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License.

Correcting Non-Parallel Sentences Activity

Read the following groups of sentences to find the item in the pair or series that is not parallel with the construction of the other items in the sentence. After you find the non-parallel item,  rewrite the sentence to create parallelism and a sense of balance to the sentence.

1. My dog loves to chase squirrels, take long naps, and chewing on her sister's face.
2. Paul plans to become an office administrator, a sales associate, or go into accounting.
3. The hardware store has huge sections devoted to electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, and tools needed for carpentry.
4. My music collection is divided into party music, hanging-out music, and music I can study to.
5. A consumer group rates my motorcycle as noisy, expensive, and not having much safety.
6. Between receiving a call from her mother and the fact that she left her backpack at home, Mia was running really late. 

Answer Key

1. My dog loves to chase squirrels, take long naps, and chew on her sister's face.
2. Paul plans to become an office administrator, a sales associate, or an accountant.
3. The hardware store has huge sections devoted to electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, and carpentry tools.
4. My music collection is divided into party music, hanging-out music, and study music.
5. A consumer group rates my motorcycle as noisy, expensive, and unsafe.
6. Between receiving a call from her mother and leaving her backpack at home, Mia was running really late.