Monday Morning Essay Tip: Parallel Construction
July 7th, 2008 | Posted in Monday Morning Essay Tips, Blogroll
Longer and more complex sentences often require parallel construction. Simply put, parallel construction ensures that any given longer sentence has a standard rhythm or construction. With parallel construction, each pronoun corresponds with another pronoun, each verb corresponds with another verb, each adjective matches with a corresponding adjective, and so on. Parallel construction can certainly happen in shorter sentences as well, and to great effect.
Consider the example “To be or not to be” – Hamlet’s words, which are among the most famous in the English language. Shakespeare wrote this short sentence in perfect parallel form; “to be” is matched perfectly with its corresponding negative “not to be” and is separated only by the necessary word “or.” Another short example from history provides a similar example of parallel construction: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” With these words, Julius Caesar was speaking in perfect parallel construction – the grammatical form is a pronoun (the word “I”) followed by a verb in the past tense (“came,” “saw,” “conquered”).
If we were to change that famous phrase just a touch, the amazing quality that it has would be lost and it would become unremarkable. For example, if Caesar had said, “I came, I saw, and I became the conqueror,” no one would be quoting him today (because the rhythm would be destroyed – it would now be verb, verb, phrase). Keep this rule in mind for everything that you write, especially for longer sentences.
Some final examples:
Bad: There are three key reasons for this success: understanding our client, trying harder than our competition and teamwork.
Good: There are three key reasons for this success: understanding our client, trying harder than our competition and working as a team. (In this example, gerunds–i.e., the words ending in “ing”–all parallel each other, unlike in the example above.)
Bad: We are in the forestry business. We sell wood to hardware stores and paper to stationery stores.
Good: We are in the forestry business. We sell wood and paper.
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