Activity: Parallel Sentences
According to the dictionary, "consistency" means "conformity in the application of something". This meaning aligns perfectly with how we will think of it in terms of writing. For our purposes, the "something" will be our use of language. Specifically, we will talk about consistency in three ways that it applies to writing: parallel sentence construction, verb tense, and point of view (pronouns). Consistency is important in good writing because it helps to make the job of the reader easy. To better understand these ideas, read about parallelism in the following section, and get some practice by doing the activity. When you are done, compare your answers to the answer key.
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.
I resolved to lose weight, to study more, and watching less TV.
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:
I resolved to lose weight, to study more, and to watch less TV.
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.
The weather was hot, there were crowds in the city, and the buses were on strike.
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:
The weather was hot, the city was crowded, and the buses were on strike.
Source: Erin Severs
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