Consistency, please! (Parallelism)

Parallelism is one of the more difficult grammar rules, but it's certainly an important one.


Parallel structure in a sentence means that all the units of the sentence are in grammatical balance.

Yeah. That makes sense.

In the easiest of terms, parallelism means that all aspects of the sentence follow the same structure in order to give a rhythm and flow to the sentence.

One of the easiest places to find parallelism, or lack thereof, is in a sentence that contains a series of verbs. The verbs should all be structured the same way.

For example, if you are saying that people ate, talked and laughed at the dinner, you have to make sure that all of those verbs carry the same past-tense structure. It would not work to say "The people ate, talked and were laughing at the dinner." To say "were laughing" veers away from the structure of the rest of the verbs.

Get it?

Here's a real-life example in an AP article titled "600,000 tourists expected for royal wedding," which was run in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

LONDON - New flags went up, cleaning crews scrubbed down, police checked for explosives and a handful of die-hard fans were already camping out. Welcome to Westminster Abbey, the ceremonial focus of Britain's royal wedding frenzy.

The sentence starts out well enough. There is consistent past tense with went, scrubbed and checked. But then we get a different construction with were already camping.

If the sentence followed perfect grammatical parallelism, it would read such:

New flags went up, cleaning crews scrubbed down, police checked for explosives and a handful of die-hard fans camped out.

Parallelism is difficult, but makes good writing even better by providing consistency and rhythm throughout the sentence.


Satter, Raphael G. "600,000 tourists expected for royal wedding." Associated Press via Star Tribune. http://www.startribune.com/world/120749819.html. 26 April 2011.