
The coach advised that I should eat healthily, exercise regularly, and that joining a gym would make this easier. I like apples, oranges, and going to the zoo. However, with complex phrases or clauses, you might lose some meaning, so we recommend method #3 (below) for those situations. Accordingly, we recommend method #1 for most cases involving parallelism issues.

This method is often the simplest way when you’re dealing with nonparallel words or simple phrases. Method #1: Make the grammatically nonconforming part match the other parts. We’ll use the sample sentences from above to illustrate each method. In each case, the idea is to make all the parts match in grammatical form.

There are three ways to fix a parallel structure problem. Each of the red words in the examples above is in a different grammatical form than the other words in their respective lists. These three sentences break parallel structure. Sentence 3 says, “Mary is a noun, noun, and verb.”.Sentence 2 says, “The coach advised that I should: (1) verb (2) verb (3) that -ing phrase.Sentence 1 says, “I like noun, noun, and -ing phrase.”.Mary is a celebrated author, dancer, and writes great songs.The coach advised that I should eat healthily, exercise regularly, and that joining a gym would make this easier.I like apples, oranges, and going to the zoo.The underlined portions indicate the parts of the sentence that serve as the triggers for parallel structures. This time, examine the colored words and phrases below. Let’s take another look at the sentences written above. After reading this article, you’ll become an expert at spotting parallelism issues! Mary is a celebrated author, dancer, and writes great songs.ĭid you notice any problems with the above sentences? If not, don’t worry.The coach advised that I should eat healthily, exercise regularly, and that joining a gym would make this easier.I like apples, oranges, and going to the zoo.So let’s start by looking at a few examples.

Identifying parallel sentence structures in any writing can be difficult. What is parallelism and why is it a problem in writing? When we string words or phrases together, we must make sure that all parts are of “equal value.” That is, they must all be in the same form. In many ways, the English language operates like math. A common writing issue for many authors of essays and research papers is making sure to use parallel structure.
