Faulty parallelism
Express your ideas clearly and accurately. Don’t be put off by the grammatical terms, but rather focus on the ways you can correct your mistakes in grammar.
Parallelism is the use of similar structure in related words, clauses, or phrases. It creates a sense of rhythm and balance within a sentence. As readers, we often correct faulty parallelism—a lack of parallel structure—intuitively because an unbalanced sentence sounds awkward and poorly constructed.
All of these sentences contain faulty parallelism. Although they are factually correct, the construction is clunky and confusing. Read the following sentences aloud:
"A simple way to check for parallelism in your writing is to make sure you have paired nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, prepositional phrases with prepositional phrases, and so on."
When these sentences are written using a parallel structure, they sound more aesthetically pleasing because they are balanced. Repetition of grammatical construction also minimises the amount of work the reader has to do to decode the sentence. This enables the reader to focus on the main idea in the sentence and not on how the sentence is put together.
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