LEO: Literacy Education Online Parallelism

Simple Parallelism

Parallel structure is really a matter of balance.  Balancing a sentence can be compared to balancing a scale if we pretend that certain words -- and, or, but -- are the balancing points and if we understand that the words being balanced must carry the same "weight" in the sentence.  One part of speech or of a sentence can be balanced only by one (or a series) of the same kind.

Notice that modifiers (like "down by the pier," "with the sunrise," and "of the fisherman") do not affect the balance of the sentences.

This example sentence is unbalanced because "and" divides two different parts of speech.  An "ing" word is used before and,while an infinitive, "to walk," is used after.  To make the sentence parallel, simply use the same part of speech for both ideas.

Here again, the form of the last item, "how to make ropes," doesn't match the other items and seems too heavy.  To balance the sentence, change the form to match as in the parallel example.

This time the sentence is unbalanced because the first two phrases include verbs, "study" and "get," but the last phrase doesn't contain a verb.   To be parallel, each phrase should follow the pattern of the first one in the series.  This can be accomplished by adding a verb to the last phrase.

A slightly different parallelism involves the common connectors-- either/or, neither/nor, not only/but also.  Here, the kind of word or part of a sentence that follows the first connector must be the same as the kind following the second.  Consider the following examples.
 

Here the two prepositional phrases are parallel; they are the same kind of structure.

In this case, the verb "destroyed" cannot balance the noun "homes."  The sentence should be rewritten so that "destroyed" appears before "not only" and so nouns follow both connectors.