| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
|
Page 54
|
| |
| harm in the imperfect telephone message cited above. Eighty-six percent accept the following example in which three nouns in the series are governed by the possessive his, while the fourth and final noun is modified by the: In the hotel room the suspect had left his keys, briefcase, spare clothes, and the receipts for the cars he had rented. This construction in fact has the virtue of adding emphasis to the final element. The receipts seem to be the most important piece of evidence that the suspect left behind. | 1 |
| When the situation is more clear-cut, however, and something in the construction is clearly out of balance, the panel is more insistent on restoring parallelism. This is the case with the coordinate conjunction not only … but also, where it is easy to spot when one element is out of place. Seventy-three percent reject the sentence The film makers not only concentrate on Edward VIII’s abdication over his love for divorcee Wallis Simpson but also his leaning toward Nazi Germany. | 2 |
| Crafting sentences with flawless parallelism takes effort and practice. Even if your readers don’t notice or object when you make mistakes, balance and symmetry are worth striving for in your writing. There are certain constructions that are notorious for throwing things out of whack. We list some of them below. | 3 |
both … and …
| | When using both and and to link parallel elements, make the words or phrases that follow them correspond grammatically. That is, whatever grammatical construction follows both, the same construction should also follow and. Thus you should say Sales have risen in both India and China or Sales have risen both in India and in China, but not Sales have risen both in India and China. | 4 |
comparisons with as and
than
| ” Did you know that more people are killed each year by hogs in Indiana than by sharks?” says a writer in Scuba Magazine. You may well be wondering how many sharks there are in Indiana. In comparisons using as and than it is the second element that can give you trouble. It is easy to set up a faulty parallel, especially when prepositional phrases are involved. Consider this sentence:
| | I want the photos in our brochure to look as impressive as their brochure.
|
| 5 |
Here the writer wants to compare photos in two different brochures, but the syntax compares the photos of one brochure with the entire brochure of the other organization. To be truly parallel, the sentence must read:
| | I want the photos in our brochure to look as impressive as those in their brochure.
|
| 6 |
Note the addition of the pronoun those to counterbalance photos in the previous section of the sentence, and the repetition of the preposition in. You could, of course, repeat the noun photos instead of using a pronoun. Here is a similar example:
| | They felt that the condition of the new buildings was not much better than the old ones.
|
| 7 |
|
|
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
